Power System Operation and Control

The primary objective of power system operation is to deliver power to its customers meeting strict tolerances on voltage magnitude and frequency. Accordingly, the operation control problems naturally divide into control of voltage magnitudes or the voltage control issues, and the control of system frequency or the frequency control problems. Power system being an interconnected large system spread over a geographically wide network, operation of the large system is complex. The controls are built to exploit the inherent time-scale and structural properties of the system. In this chapter, we focus on the frequency control problem as an example of power system controls. In fact, Automatic Frequency Control in the North American electric power grid was the first instance of a successful implementation of a large-scale network based control scheme.