PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF POWER SYSTEM NETWORKS USING FLEXIBLE ALTERNATING CURRENT TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS DEVICES: THE NIGERIAN 330 KV ELECTRICITY GRID AS A CASE STUDY
Abstract
A wide electricity supply-demand gap especially in developing economy such as Nigeria has created series of challenges such as frequent power outages, poor voltage profile and high power losses among others yet to be addressed. This work examines the effect of Static Var Compensator (SVC), a Flexible Alternating Current Transmission Systems (FACTS) device for performance improvement of power system networks with the Nigerian 330 kV, 28-bus electricity grid considered as a test network. The steady state performance of the system was modeled using Newton-Raphson load flow equations and was simulated without and with compensation on MATLAB/PSAT toolbox (version 2.1.9 ‘R2012a’). The obtained results showed that the system voltage profile improved to acceptable limit defined as with compensation compared to when voltage magnitudes of buses 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 22 and 26 of the test network fell outside of the acceptable limit without compensation. Also, the system total active power loss reduced from 15.727 MW without SVC to 14.709 MW with SVC, giving a 6.47% reduction in total active power loss. These results showed that the inclusion of SVC on the Nigerian electricity grid will improve both voltage profile and power transfer capability of the system.
