New Developments in Planning of Reactive Power Compensation Devices

The need to compensate reactive-power is highlighted by the well-known problem that arises when starting up very powerful nuclear plants, sometimes located very far away from the areas of consumption. Since our EHV network is very expanded and highly meshed, such need varies considerably as a function of the availability of the generating units and the grid. To tackle this problem, we have drawn up a new, basically probabilistic, method which accounts for the great many different situations characterizing a large meshed network (1000 nodes) while providing reasonably safe operating conditions in case of n-1 contingency. It is today an operational method. We illustrate it with the results of a recent study on compensation device-planning on the EHV EDF network by 1990.