DIRECT COMPUTATION OF MARGINAL OPERATING CONDITIONS FOR VOLTAGE COLLAPSE

Voltage collapse is a serious concern to the electirc utility industry. It is common to associate steady-state stability with the ability of the transmission system to transport real power and to associate voltage collapse with the inability to provide reactive power at the necessary locations within the system. An algorithm to directly calculate the critical point of system voltage collapse was presented by the authors. The method (based on the ordinary power flow equations and explicit requirement of singularity of the Jacobian matrix) is basically one degree of freedom with proper load distribution factors. This paper suggests a modified algorithm to increase the degree of freedom, introducing the nonlinear programming technique. The objective function is a distance measure between the present operating point and the closest voltage collapse point. Knowledge of the distance and the most vulnarable bus from the voltage collapse point of view may be used as a useful index for the secure system operation.