Voltage Stability Monitoring Using a Modified Thevenin Impedance

This paper presents a method for voltage stability monitoring based on the maximum power transfer to the load. The only required information is the system topology, the data from PMUs and the operational status of synchronous generators. With this information, the Thevenin impedance seen from a load bus can be estimated and by using the Thevenin theorem for maximum power transfer an impedance based stability index can be established. Since the Thevenin impedance is influenced by the operational conditions of the synchronous generators, it is consequently not a constant value and differs from the short circuit impedance of the bus. It is emphasized that the method requires only the information of the considered subsystem. Therefore, since the computation requirement is insignificant, the algorithm can be used for online monitoring. The validation of the approach is achieved by simulating a simple transmission system.