Time-domain analysis of power system stability with damping control and asymmetric feedback delays

Power systems can be stabilized using distributed control methods with wide-area measurements for feedback. However, wide-area measurements are subject to time delays in communication, which can have undesirable effects on system performance. We present time-domain analysis results regarding the small-signal stability of a two-area power system with damping control subjected to asymmetric time delays in the feedback measurements. We consider two wide-area damping control implementations. The first is implemented with a High Voltage DC transmission line, and the second uses distributed Energy Storage devices. Numerical results show regions of stability for the closed-loop systems that depend on the time delays and the choice of the control gain. These results show that increasing the control gains cause the systems to be less robust to time delays, and, under certain conditions, increasing the time delays can have a stabilizing effect. Furthermore, we provide analysis of time simulations and eigenvalue plots that verify these stability regions and show how stability is affected as time delays increase.