New Performance Indices for Voltage Stability Analysis in a Power System

The frequent occurrence of voltage instability in a modern power system is alarming and thus, has been of great concern to power system utilities. In this paper, a new performance index based on the power flow solutions for voltage stability assessment of a power system is presented. First, the voltage deviation with respect to reactive power load variation at each load bus is found. Thereafter, the performance voltage bus index for each load bus is computed. An improved modal analysis technique (IMAT) is used to identify weak nodes that are liable to voltage instability in a power system. This technique uses a submatrix of the full Jacobian matrix for voltage stability analysis. Comparison of the proposed method is done with existing voltage stability indices and the conventional modal analysis technique (CMAT). The effectiveness of all the approaches presented are tested on both Western system coordinating Council (WSCC) 9-bus, IEEE 30 bus and IEEE 57 bus test systems. Results obtained show that the proposed techniques can serve as an alternative tool to other conventional techniques for voltage stability assessment in a power system and can be of tremendous benefits in the planning and operation of a power system by system operators.