On the Configuration of the US Western Interconnection Voltage Stability Boundary

Abstract—Stability limits are considered in power system planning and operations to estimate the available stability margins and, if possible, to maximize the utilization of transmission facilities. These important tasks are influenced by configuration of the stability boundary. The paper introduces a new fast approach to explore the voltage stability boundary of a large system and reveal its detailed multidimensional structure. The 17939-bus U.S. Western Interconnection planning model was used to illustrate the method. Significant peculiarities of the boundary’s configuration were identified, including its nonconvexity, discontinuity, branching and internal singularities (“holes”) that were not known before and could not been found by traditional methods. Experiments using WECC system are performed to evaluate the computation time using different methods. Our results show that the proposed methods are very promising in reducing calculation time and complexity