Study of system-wide Automatic Voltage Control on PJM system

The feasibility and potential benefits of the system-wide Automatic Voltage Control (AVC) in PJM system are studied in this paper. A test AVC system with a hierarchical structure is adopted for simulation study, which is based on eight typical real-time snapshots from the solutions of state estimator in the PJM´s Energy Management System (EMS). For each snapshot, the control action simulation is executed in a recursive way by power flow (PF) calculation until the result is no longer changed. Simulation results on adaptive zone division, tertiary voltage control and secondary voltage control are presented here, and comparison of transmission losses and reactive power reserve for all the eight cases before and after AVC are carried out. About 1% reduction of transmission system loss, which means saving energy more than 100 million kWh/year and saving money more than $10 million/year, and about 1% increase of system MVAR reserve can be achieved in PJM system thanks to AVC. The research results are evaluated by existing CA (Contingency Assessment) tool with 4745 contingencies, which prove that the performance indices in security after AVC is improved significantly than that before AVC. The Phase II of PJM´s AVC project, online implementation of AVC at PJM control center, is ongoing now.