Improvement of Sudanese National Electric Grid Performance Using Modern Reactive Power Compensators

Abstract

Power systems suffer greatly from voltage instability especially due to excessive consumption or injection of reactive power by the system elements and the consumers ‘loads. The voltage instability caused by the variation in their active power requirement of the system’s elements and the consumers’ loads either result in excessive high or low voltage which may cause damage to the system and the consumer’s load since the system elements and the consumers’ loads are design to operate within a specific voltage range transmission lines are heavily loaded and the system stability becomes a power transfer-limiting factor. Flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS) controllers have been mainly used for solving various power system steady state control problems. Flexible AC transmission systems or FACTS are devices which allow the flexible and dynamic control of power systems. Enhancement of system stability using FACTS controllers has been investigated. STATCOM is a static synchronous generator operated as a shunt-connected static VAR compensator whose capacitive or inductive output current can be controlled independent of the ac system voltage. The STATCOM, like its conventional counterpart, the SVC, controls transmission voltage by reactive shunt compensation This thesis discussed the role of STATCOM in VAR compensation and their effect in improving voltage profile. In this project Sudan national grid under peak load was studied and amount of VAR compensation was found. Also a suitable location and sizes of STATCOM were selected