Control Room Requirements for Voltage Control in Future Power Systems

In future power grids, a large integration of renewable energy sources is foreseen, which will impose serious technical challenges to system operators. To mitigate some of the problems that renewable energy sources may bring, new voltage and frequency control strategies must be developed. Given the expected evolution of technologies and information systems, these new strategies will benefit from increasing system observability and resources controllability, enabling a more efficient grid operation. The ELECTRA IRP project addressed the new challenges that future power systems will face and developed new grid management and control functionalities to overcome the identified problems. This work, implemented in the framework of ELECTRA, presents an innovative functionality for the control room of the cell operator and its application in assistance with the voltage control designed for the Web-of-Cells. The voltage control method developed uses a proactive mode to calculate the set-points to be sent to the flexible resources, each minute, for a following 15-min period. This way, the voltage control method developed is able to mitigate voltage problems that may occur, while, at the same time, contributes to reduce the energy losses. To enable a straightforward utilization of this functionality, a user interface was created for system operators so they can observe the network state and control resources in a forthright manner accordingly.