Present-day economic and environmental constraints push power systems to be operated closer to their limits. A common limiting factor for power transmission is the risk of voltage instability in recent years. As the ultimate countermeasure to voltage collapse, load shedding is normally considered the last resort, when there are no other alternatives to stop an approaching voltage collapse. The requirements of a practical load shedding scheme are to prevent a power system from voltage collapse and to maximize its reliability. In order to design such a scheme, the following tasks are equally important: 1. Recognizing the approaching voltage collapse. 2. Determining the best load shedding locations. 3. Minimizing the amount of load shedding. This thesis firstly investigates the widely used undervoltage load shedding schemes (UVLS) and the single-port impedance match (SPIM) based schemes. The findings explain the difficulties faced by them. An original load shedding oriented voltage stability monitoring scheme, which involves developing a new multi-port network equivalent, is then developed. With the help of the multi-port network equivalent, the monitoring scheme can not only recognize the approaching voltage collapse in time, but also can easily rank the load buses based on their weakness. The results of ranking are consistent with those obtained from modal analysis method. This thesis then proposes a practical event-driven load shedding scheme based on the experiences learned from the schemes implemented by various utilities. The scheme involves developing a multistage method, which is to optimize the amount of load shedding. A general design procedure for the scheme is presented in the thesis. Using a real 2038 bus system as an example, the design methodology is described in detail. The methodology is expected to help power system engineers develop their own load shedding schemes. A practical emergency demand response scheme is also developed and presented in the appendix. It is aimed at choosing the proper demand response participants and minimizing the total cost while achieving a certain level of operation reserves. / Power Engineering and Power Electronics

No description available.