Effects of Synchronous Machine Modeling in Large Scale System Studies

A study was made of the accuracy of utility power system stability simulations, as affected by the complexity of the synchronous generator models and the data used with the models. The investigation was performed by simulating the operation of a representative multimachine power system with many combinations of disturbance, initial load, system stiffness, model detail and model data. The findings from this study provide guidelines for the selection of the simplest computational machine models for use in large scale stability analyses, with the goal of minimizing the cost of computer usage while assuring sufficient accuracy of the results. Recommendations are made for selecting machine data more suitable for use in stability studies than the standard machine data.