Application of active power sensitivity to frequency and voltage variations on load shedding

The occurrence of a large disturbance in a power system can lead to a decline in the system frequency and bus voltages due to a real and reactive power deficiency or due to the formation of islands with generation–load imbalance. Load shedding is an emergency control action that can prevent a blackout in the power system by relieving the overload in some parts of the system. This paper shows that rate of change of frequency can be utilized to determine the magnitude of generation–load imbalance, while the rate of change of voltage with respect to active power can be utilized to identify the sensitive bus for load shedding. The frequency, voltages and their rate of change can be obtained by means of measurements in real-time from various devices such as digital recorders or phasor measurement units or these parameters can be estimated from the voltage data by other means such as an optimal estimation method like Kalman filtering. The rate of change of system frequency, along with the equivalent system inertia may be used to estimate the magnitude of the disturbance prior to each load shedding step. The buses with a higher rate of change of voltage may be identified as the critical ones for load shedding and load can be first shed at these buses, depending on the change in the power flow at each bus. This application is tested on the IEEE 30 bus system and the preliminary results demonstrate that it is feasible to be used in load shedding to restore system voltage and frequency.