Adaptive Signal Selection of Wide-Area Damping Controllers Under Various Operating Conditions

Since operating conditions of power systems always change, the input and output signals of wide-area damping controller (WADC), which are selected at an operating point, may not be able to guarantee the damping effect at other operating points. This paper focuses on a new adaptive signal selection for WADC against several operating conditions, such as various load demands, control signal failure, line and generator outages, and effect of communication latency. The joint controllability and observability is used to determine the best input and output pairs of WADC at any operating points. Small-signal and transient stabilities study in the IEEE 50-machine system including renewable sources, i.e., wind and solar photovoltaic generators are conducted to evaluate the effect of the proposed method. Study result demonstrates that the WADC with the adaptive signal selection yields superior damping effect to the WADC with the fixed signal selection over wide range operations.