Assessment study of shunt FACTS-based controllers effectiveness on power system stability enhancement

An assessment study of two different shunt FACTS-based controllers for damping power system oscillation is presented in this paper. Namely, the static compensator (STATCOM) and static VAr compensator (SVC) are considered in this study. The design problem of STATCOM-based and SVC-based controllers is formulated as an optimization problem. Using the developed linearized power system model equipped with STATCOM and SVC, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to search for optimal controller parameters. To select the superior stabilizing signal, that has the major controllability of the poorly damped electromechanical modes of STATCOM signals, the singular value decomposition (SVD) based approach is used. The FACTS-based controllers are evaluated on a weakly interconnected power system with STATCOM/SVC installed at the mid line. Eigenvalue analysis and nonlinear time domain simulations under a severe disturbance are carried out to examine the system response. The results show the superiorly of STATCOM over SVC in increasing the damping of low frequency oscillation.