A method to measure QV curves and its applications in power systems

The QV curve method has been adopted by many utilities because of its advantages on convergence and direct relationship with reactive compensation. QV curves, however, are traditionally obtained by a series of off-line power flow solutions, and their applications are limited to off-line voltage stability analysis. This paper proposes a measurement-based QV curve method, which can measure on-line part of the QV curve in the vicinity of the operating point employing some adjustable parameters (e.g. AVR settings) and a special compensation method to implement the measurement procedure. Theoretical analysis and simulation results on the real life BC Hydro system show that the proposed method works well and good consistency between the QV curves by the measurement procedure and the traditional method is achieved. Two application examples of the proposed method are also presented.