Smooth Evacuation of Power in Grid Connected Small Hydro Power Stations by Application of SVCs

Abstract

This paper explores some of the practical limitations encountered by small hydro power (SHP) units while evaluating various possibilities so as to maintain continuous generation by these units while ensuring smooth evacuation of every unit of real power generated by such units to the neighboring grid in a grid connected power system scenario. The proposed simulation has been tested under some worst system conditions and case studies conducted on the IEEE 30-bus test system by way of connecting the SHP units to the most critical system bus of the test system with static VAR compensator (SVC) control at the local bus. The test results have been validated with the support of power flow tools on a Matlab based Matpower platform. It is observed that the results obtained through application of SVCs are far more promising than those of the results obtained from OLTC transformer control mechanism only.