Practical Approaches to Perform Transient Stability Studies for Industrial and Commercial Power Systems

Many industrial and commercial power systems have installed generation facilities on-site for the purpose of increasing efficiency, reducing electricity cost, and improving system reliability and resiliency. Adding synchronous generators to local power systems brings stability concerns and tremendously increases complexity in system planning and operation. By principle of power system operation, all running synchronous machines interconnected in the same electrical network are required to remain in synchronism with each other; otherwise they will become unstable and eventually lose the rotor angle stability, which can be quickly propagated across the entire network to cause a system-wide shut down. Following IEEE standards and industrial practices, and leveraging authors’ extensive experience in modeling power system dynamics and conducting transient stability studies, this paper addresses approaches and procedures to perform transient stability study step-by-step in aiming to help power engineers to understand fundamentals and knowledge sets required in this technical space. The paper also introduces basic transient stability study scenario considerations and protection methods to ensure instability issues are identified and stable system operations are verified. The most recent relevant IEEE standards, IEEE task force reports and industrial literatures on transient stability study are referenced in the paper.