Analysis of voltage collapse in the Kerala power grids

Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) as many other utilities uses breaker switched capacitor for voltage support and reactive power compensation in the largest Grid substation at Kalamassery. At present the installed capacity of the capacitor bank does not fully match with the system requirement which leads to a voltage collapse. Optimizing the use as an economical reactive power source is the key issue to be addressed. The paper describes the works carried out to evaluate the present system requirement and the proposal for the most optimal location for FACTS device to meet the requirement. The criterion used in finding the optimal location is based on the voltage profile of the system; that is the voltage deviation at each bus with respect to its optimum value is minimized. The results show that the method works effectively and is applicable to practical network.