Voltage sags are short duration of voltage reduction caused by system faults, overloads and starting of large motors. Voltage sags are the main causes of trips of various sensitive equipment. In order to understand the voltage-tolerance performance of some process control equipment, this thesis presents test results of some sensitive equipment (such as computers, AC contactors, high intensity discharge lamps and programmable logic controller) and provides their voltage tolerance curves. A number of magnitudes and durations recommended by IEC 61000- 4- 11 are used to perform the tests. With the performance information in hands, power quality requirements of different types of equipment and customer, and area of vulnerability for sensitive loads could be estimated.

Since large scale unscheduled tripping of wind power generation could lead to power system stability problem. Thus network interconnection regulations become more rigid when the wind power penetration reaches a non-neglible portion of the total power generation. This thesis presents a comparison of five different low voltage ride through (LVRT) capability enhancement technologies, i.e., additional rotor resistance, DC bus chopper, crowbar on rotor, the combination of above schemes, and grid voltage support by controlling grid side converter. System simulations are performed under Digsilent environment with model and control blocks provided by the package. Additional models are developed to implement the LVRT enhancement schemes studied. A Doubly-Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) with pitch control is used to simulate different system fault scenarios with different voltage sag magnitude and duration time. Simulation results indicate that different enhancement schemes provide various levels in relieving DC bus overvoltage, rotor winding overcurrent, and overspeed problems, and the method combines all tested schemes seems to provide the best result.

Large off-shore wind farms raise the concern of widespread tripping of off-shore wind generator in the presence of system faults and corresponding voltage dips that could potentially cause system wide blackout. In this thesis an offshore wind farm and three different types of power transmission are modeled and studied using simulation software. Off-shore wind farm composed of fixed speed induction generators and HVAC interconnection, HVAC interconnection plus STATCOM and HVDC interconnections are studied. Onshore grid faults are simulated for each interconnection. Voltage tolerance curves are established to assess fault ride through capability of each interconnection and compared with different grid transmission ride through capacity required by grid operator.

When more induction generator based wind farms are integrated into the power system, the system voltage dips and stability problems may arise due to the draw of reactive power by induction generators. The power system short-circuit event induced wind turbine trips could result in power imbalance and lead to power system instability. This thesis studies the influence of two compensation techniques on the wind turbine low voltage ride-through (LVRT) capability. One of which is based on a parallel compensation by a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM), and the other one is a series compensation by a dynamic voltage restorer (DVR). In this study, Matlab tools and models are used to simulate an active-stall controlled fixed-speed induction generator connected to a power system. Two system configurations are used to simulate three phase faults and compare the improvement of wind turbine LVRT capability due to the two studied compensation techniques. Simulation results indicate that wind turbine compensated by DVR would have better LVRT performance than that by STATCOM in dealing with the low voltage situations due to system faults.

Voltage sag (dip), a sudden reduction of the voltage magnitude within a short duration in power system, is one of major concerns of power quality problems. The main reason of the increased concerns for voltage sag problems is that the losses caused by voltage sag events are high and not negligible. Reliability indices have been used for many years to quantify the effect of sustained interruptions on the electric power system. Power quality indices reflecting the severity of various power quality problems, such as flicker, harmonics, voltage swell and sag conditions, power factor, losses, electromagnetic interference, and other phenomena, are still under development. The representation and classification of voltage sags have been studied recently by standard-setting organizations. In order to find compatibility between service quality and the equipment adopted and a least cost solution for possible power quality problems, the concept of system disturbance level and equipment immunity level was proposed in IEC 61000-3-7 but without clear definitions. A novel voltage sag index based on fuzzy logic technique to quantify system disturbance and equipment immunity levels is proposed in this dissertation. This approach takes network vulnerability, equipment sensitivity and uncertainties in measuring voltage sags into account, thereby, providing meaningful information for both the utility and customers. Using the proposed method, the probabilistic distribution of system disturbances can be obtained from the single event indices of all events recorded and the probabilistic distribution of equipment sag immunity capability can be evaluated based on the device voltage sag tolerance curve. This dissertation also presents a novel framework for predicting the number of equipment disruptions due to voltage sags in a unit of time by using the disturbance and immunity levels concepts. In the proposed approach, the number of disruptions is computed by using the unreliability concept. The area of overlapping between the distributions of site disturbance and equipment immunity levels, which indicates the number of possible disruptions, is calculated based on interference theory and reliability computations. The presented methodology can be used as a planning tool to quantify the system disturbances and equipment sensitivity. It can also be used to perform cost analysis of the compatibility of equipment with an electric power system. To minimize the costs due to voltage sags, it is always a good strategy to maintain a minimum overlap between the equipment immunity level and site disturbance level to have satisfactory operation of the equipment. The tool achieved in this work can be used to perform such analyses.