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A Simplied Voltage Stability Index (SVSI)

S. Prez-Londoo
a,
, L.F. Rodrguez
a
, G. Olivar
b
a
Electrical Engineering Program, Universidad Tecnolgica de Pereira, Pereira, Colombia
b
Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Manizales, Colombia
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 30 August 2013
Received in revised form 20 June 2014
Accepted 23 June 2014
Available online 17 July 2014
Keywords:
Voltage stability index
Voltage collapse
Critical bus
Contingency analysis
Line outage
a b s t r a c t
This paper proposes an improved indicator to estimate the voltage stability margin in electric power sys-
tems, dened as the Simplied Voltage Stability Index (SVSI), which uses voltage measurements and some
assumptions from the Thvenin model. The proposed technique uses information about the current oper-
ating condition incorporating only the voltage phasor measurements and the power systems topology.
The proposed index has been evaluated on the IEEE 30-bus and 118-bus test systems, considering several
operating conditions and contingencies as line outages. The validation of the proposed index was per-
formed by comparing it to other referenced voltage stability indexes. Simulation results show that the
proposed index gives a good indication of the voltage stability of a power system; it is also simple and
computationally less expensive than the indices it was compared to.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Voltage instability is considered one of the major threats to the
secure operation of many power systems due to the consequences
of the kinds of incidents which have been reported worldwide in
recent decades. One serious type of voltage instability is voltage
collapse, which may leave large groups of people without electric-
ity for extended periods of time. The blackouts that occurred in
North America in 1996 and 2003 and in Europe in 2003 are exam-
ples of large-scale blackouts where voltage collapses played an
important role [13]. Such incidents have severe social impacts
and cause huge economic losses. For this reason, the importance
of implementing suitable and efcient techniques to monitor volt-
age stability has increased.
Performance indices have been used to estimate proximity to
stability problems, as these can determine how close a system is
to a voltage collapse. The objective of these indices is to dene a
scalar magnitude that can be monitored as system conditions
change. A review of the main referenced sources reveals that these
indices, which use different concepts to predict voltage collapse,
provide reliable information about critical buses and lines of the
power system. For instance, some voltage stability indices are
based on power ow Jacobian matrix such as the minimum eigen-
value [4], test function [5], tangent vector [6] and bus voltage rank-
ing index V/Vo [7]. Although several improvements have been
proposed, Jacobian matrix-based indices such as these are not suit-
able for online applications due to their accuracy of collapse pre-
dictions or the high computational requirements.
There are many other indices which use the elements of the
admittance matrix and some system variables such as bus voltages
and power ow through lines such as VCPI [8], L-index [9],
extended L-index [10], LCPI [11], L
mn
[12], LQP [13], FVSI [14].
Some of these indices use the concept of the maximum power
transfer that can be transmitted to the load bus in a simple two-
bus power system. These indices require less computational effort
and are suitable for quickly diagnosing the power system voltage
stability.
On the other hand, in the context of the recent use of phasor
measurement unit (PMU) technology in power systems, the
research area of voltage stability has shown that PMU-enhanced
functions are useful for voltage stability monitoring. According to
[15], PMU-based voltage instability monitoring can be classied
into two broad categories: methods that are based on local mea-
surements and methods that are based on global measurements.
Of the methods that are based on local measurements, most
rely on the Thvenin impedance matching condition [1618]. In
[19], a method for online monitoring of voltage collapse that is
based on measurements was suggested. This method uses the
recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm to estimate the parameters
of the equivalent power system, which is then used to model the
rest of the network as seen from the load bus. However, the result-
ing determination is not straightforward, because the Thvenin
parameters vary during the period of the two measurements in
response to the changing conditions in the remaining part of the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2014.06.044
0142-0615/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Corresponding author. Tel.: +57 (6) 3137122x114; fax: +57 (6) 3137122.
E-mail addresses: saperez@utp.edu.co (S. Prez-Londoo), luferodriguez@utp.
edu.co (L.F. Rodrguez), golivart@unal.edu.co (G. Olivar).
Electrical Power and Energy Systems 63 (2014) 806813
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Electrical Power and Energy Systems
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ i j epes
power system [20]. Ref. [21] proposes a method for monitoring the
bus voltage stability condition, using only two consecutive voltage
measurements.
In the second category are the methods that use the potential of
global measurements given by the Wide Area Monitoring System
(WAMS), which require the observability of a whole region to deter-
mine the voltage stability condition [22,23]. Ref. [23] proposed a
heuristic methodology to monitor voltage collapse in a power sys-
tem based on several assumptions on the Thvenin model and a
wide area network of PMUs. The goal of the proposed index is to
demonstrate that the voltage dropping across a path to the nearest
generator is comparable to the voltage dropping across the Thve-
nin impedance, and this has results comparable to those of other
indices based on the Thvenin parameters estimation. However,
this method could be computationally expensive due to the appli-
cation of an iterative algorithm in determining the path between
the generator bus and the load bus at several changing operating
conditions of the analyzed power system. Therefore, an improved
and less computationally expensive index to measure the proximity
of the voltage collapse point is presented in this paper.
The main purpose of the proposed index is the utilization of the
advantages offered by the new monitoring systems applied to the
power systems. The index proposed in this paper is based on some
ideas given in [23], but considers a simple and efcient approach to
determine the minimal path between the analyzed load and the
nearest generator, which reduces the computational time response
and makes this index available to be used in the online determina-
tion of the voltage stability. Additionally, a correction factor to
improve the index performance is also included.
The effectiveness of the proposed index is demonstrated in tests
considering several operating conditions and under contingency
(n 1) on the IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 118-bus power systems [24],
and by comparing the obtained results with some existing voltage
stability margin indices.
Indices to determine the voltage stability margin
Several methods have been proposed to assess the voltage sta-
bility of a power system. In the following section two voltage sta-
bility indices are briey described, in order to be later compared
with the Simplied Voltage Stability Index (SVSI) proposed here.
Detailed aspects related to those indices are obtained from the pro-
vided references.
The L-index
This approach, derived by Kessel and Glavitsch [9], proposes a
voltage stability index based on the solution of the power ow
equations, as presented in (1):
L max
j2al
L
j
max
j2al
1
P
i2aG
F
ji
V
i
V
j

1
where a
l
is the set of load buses and a
G
is the set of generator buses.
V
i
and V
j
are voltage phasors at buses i and j respectively, and F
ji
is
the element in row j and column i of matrix F, whose elements are
obtained from the Y
bus
matrix. The value of the L-index, which is
evaluated close to 1.00, indicates that the particular bus is near to
its instability region, which may lead to a voltage collapse affecting
the entire power system.
VSI index
The Voltage Stability Index (VSI) was derived by Genet and
Maun [23], based on some assumptions on the Thvenin model
presented in Fig. 1.
At the point of maximum loadability, the amplitude of the
complex voltage drop at the Thvenin impedance Z is equal to
the amplitude of the voltage at the load bus V
r
. This point
corresponds to the nose of the PV curve when a constant power
load is considered.
The main assumption in this index is that the nearest generator
to the analyzed bus already gives valuable information comparable
to the Thvenin voltage, which can be used for the index calcula-
tion. The VSI for a bus i is then dened as presented in (2):
VSI
i

V
i
DV
i
2
where V
i
is the voltage at the bus i and DV
i
is an approximation of
the voltage drop across the Thvenin impedance, which can be
assumed as the distance to the nearest generator. If this is exact,
the value of VSI
i
is one at the maximum loadability point [23].
Each of the j paths between the load bus i and each generator
bus of the power system must be analyzed to choose the shortest
path according to (3), where DV
i
can be calculated as the sum of
the absolute values of the complex voltage drop for each path.
DV
J
i
t min
j
DV
j
i
t min
j
X
n
j
1
b1
jV
b
t V
b1
tj 3
where n
j
is the number of buses in the power system.
According to (3), the nearest generator of bus i must be deter-
mined to calculate the VSI at each time instance. To do this, the
author of [23] uses an iterative algorithm to dene a matrix, which
contains the complete paths between bus i and the rst generator
with voltage control in each column. The process to determine the
matrix is summarized in the following steps:
Step (1). Start from bus i and explore all the branches that
arrived at that bus.
Step (2). From bus i, choose one incident branch (that connects
to bus k) and reproduce it several times in the matrix to match
the number of incident branches (without considering the ini-
tial branch connected to bus i).
Step (3). From bus k, explore the incident branch according to
step 2. If a generator with voltage control is found, stop the pro-
cess. If the exploration of a branch is nished and the last bus
has no voltage control, the current branch is not included in
the matrix.
Step (4). The process continues in this way for each new bus of
the analyzed power system.
Once the matrix is determined for a specic bus, the distance
for each branch of the tree is evaluated with (3) in order to select
the nearest generator. Then (2) is applied to calculate the index of
the bus i.
One of the main drawbacks of the above methodology is its high
computational cost due to the iterative determination paths
between generator and load buses under the changing operating
conditions of the power system. At each topological variation of
the power system due to the reach of generators limits or in the
case of contingencies, the tree matrix must be calculated, which
is not a simple task, especially considering the large size of most
Fig. 1. Load bus connected to a power system represented by the Thevenin s
equivalent.
S. Prez-Londoo et al. / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 63 (2014) 806813 807
power systems. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the path
determination methodology.
A proposed Simplied Voltage Stability Index (SVSI)
Considering the previously presented analysis, an improved
Simplied Voltage Stability Index (SVSI) is here proposed to ana-
lyze the voltage stability in power systems. This index is based
on the concept of relative electrical distance (RED), which is used
to select the nearest generator to a specic load bus, and also the
association of electrical variables to improve its performance.
Relative electrical distance (RED)
For a given system, the relation between the complex current (I)
and voltage vectors (V) at the generator buses (G) and load buses
(L) is represented by the admittance matrix, as is given in (4):
I
G
I
L


Y
GG
Y
GL
Y
LG
Y
LL

V
G
V
L

4
where [Y
GG
], [Y
GL
], [Y
LG
], and [Y
LL
] are the corresponding partitioned
portions of the power systems Y-bus matrix. Rearranging (4), (5)
can be given as:
V
L
I
G


Z
LL
F
LG
K
GL
Y
GG

I
L
V
G

5
where F
LG
= |Y
LL
|
1
|Y
LG
| is a complex matrix that gives the relation
between load and source bus voltages. The REDs (i.e., the relative
locations of load buses with respect to the generator buses) are
obtained from the F
LG
matrix, as is proposed by [25] and given in
(6):
R
LG
A abs F
LG
A abs Y
LL
j j
1
Y
LG
j j

6
where [A] is the matrix with size (n g) g, n is the total number of
buses of the network, and g is the number of generator buses. All of
the elements of matrix [A] are equal to unity. The information given
by the matrix R
LG
can be used instead of path algorithms to obtain
the electrical distances between load and generator buses.
Denition of SVSI
Once the nearest generator to a specied load bus is found with
the R
LG
matrix, the voltage drop on the Thvenin impedance DV
i
is
estimated using (7):
DV
i

X
n
j
1
b1
V
b
!
V
b1
!

V
g
!
V
i
!

7
where V
g
and V
l
are the voltage phasors at the nearest generator and
the analyzed load bus respectively. Eq. (7) is a useful simplication
of the original proposal [23], because in the new denition of the
voltage drop only the generator and load voltage buses are
considered.
According to [26], all voltage stability indices proposed by lead-
ing studies present some degree of inaccuracy due to the different
approximations considered. The new index presented here is no
exception, and therefore it is important to understand that the pro-
posed SVSI relies on other physical quantities (magnitudes and/or
angles of voltages and powers) to improve its performance.
As the power demand increases, reaching the point of maxi-
mum loading in one or several buses of the analyzed power sys-
tem, high drops of voltage are experienced in some buses. This
phenomenon indicates a possible voltage collapse and is included
in the SVSI formulation as the correction factor b. This factor helps
to increase the sensitivity of the proposed index, outperforming
the one proposed in [23]. The correction factor b for the SVSI is
dened as (8).
b 1 m

axjV
m
j jV
l
j
2
8
The proposed correction factor is associated with the highest differ-
ences of voltage magnitude between two buses (m and l), that can
be obtained directly from PMU measurements in the analyzed
power system under specic operating conditions. Considering
the previous, the SVSI is given in (9):
SVSI
i

DV
i
b V
i
9
To consider a power system as voltage unstable, the proposed index
must be close to unity if and only if the voltage drop in the Thvenin
impedance was equal to the voltage at the load bus.
Due to the reduction of the computational effort required to
estimate the proposed index, this is dened by the authors as the
SVSI. The ow chart diagram for the SVSI estimation is given in
Fig. 2.
In Fig. 2 it is clear that the proposed SVSI index is a measure-
ments-based VSI, that requires information exchange between sev-
eral monitoring buses. Specically, for the application, the
proposed index requires of voltage phasors at all buses of the ana-
lyzed power system to nd a region prone to voltage instability.
But this implies that PMU units are available at each buses of the
system, or an optimal PMU placement scheme have been previ-
ously dened. In most of the real power systems it is carrying
out a progressive integration of synchrophasor technology to the
Energy Management System (EMS) at the control center [27].
Therefore, the previously explained, facilitates the implementation
of the strategy here proposed.
Calculation of F
LG
and
R
LG
matrices
yes
Initialization
System network topology
Y
bus
matrix
Calculation of the dropped
voltage between the load bus
and the nearest generator and
Compute SVSI
For a given operating
condition p
Data acquisition to get
system voltage phasors
New operating
condition?
Stop
no
Fig. 2. Flow chart of the SVSI.
808 S. Prez-Londoo et al. / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 63 (2014) 806813
Otherwise, the information concerning to the status of the gen-
erators and the power system topology are also needed to apply
the SVSI, which is normally available at the control centers. A gen-
erator is considered to be in PQ mode if it loses voltage control but
not active and reactive power. This happens when a limiter device
is activated. Two types of limiters may be involved: the Over-Exci-
tation Limiter (OEL) and the Stator Current Limiter (SCL) [28].
These limiters protect the machine from thermal overload. When
the generators limits have been reached, it switches to the PQ
mode of operation, and under this condition the generator cannot
be considered in the search for the nearest generator. This pro-
duces a change of the Ybus matrix and therefore must be consid-
ered in the SVSI calculation.
Finally, this paper shows that is possible to dene a voltage sta-
bility index using basic information about the analyzed real power
system, obtained from modern monitoring devices such as PMUs;
the proposed SVSI then assumes the availability of a suitable
WAM infrastructure, and therefore all voltage-phasor measure-
ments are assumed to be available.
Simulation results and discussion
To illustrate the methodology described above, initially an
example of the application of the RED concept is presented. Addi-
tionally, a comparison with the VSI index determination is
described to evaluate the performance of the proposed index.
Finally, the applicability of the SVSI is analyzed using the IEEE
30-bus and IEEE 118-bus power systems [24].
Comparative analysis considering the VSI and SVSI indexes
Application of the SVSI calculation
The IEEE 14-bus system presented in [24] is used to verify the
performance of the proposed SVSI index and to illustrate its appli-
cation. To observe the SVSI estimation, the voltage stability of bus
14 for the base case system is analyzed.
Step one: Determining the nearest generator to the load bus. For the
SVSI calculation, the RED concept for the power system is required,
taking into consideration the rated load case as described by the
R
LG
matrix presented in Table 1.
From the R
LG
matrix, GEN6 is the nearest generation bus to the
load bus 14, which is at the minimum distance of 0.3841. It is clear
that the information given in Table 1, which is taken as the RED,
can be used to quickly evaluate the index and is equivalent to
the paths between load and generator buses found by the path-
searching algorithm.
Step two: Estimating the SVSI. According to the R
LG
matrix pre-
sented in Table 1, the nearest generator to bus 14 is generator 6.
Therefore, the voltage drop between generator 6 and bus 14 is cal-
culated in (10):
DV
6
14
V
6
!
V
14
!

0:0632 10
The correction factor is calculated by using the highest voltage dif-
ference according to load ow results (or measurements taken from
WAMs), given in Table 2, where buses 1 and 3 have the largest
difference.
Therefore, factor b is obtained using (11):
b 1 jV
1
j jV
3
j
2
1 1:06 1:01
2
0:9975 11
According to the SVSI denition, the index for bus 14 is presented in
(12):
SVSI
14

DV
6
14
b V
14
0:0621 12
This shows that bus 14 is a voltage-stable bus under the evaluated
operating condition. In the next section, the above-presented proce-
dure is compared to the one required for the VSI calculation.
Application of the VSI methodology
Step one: Determining the path tree. According to the iterative algo-
rithm presented in Section VSI index, the rst step in the index
calculation is the determination of the matrix from bus 14 to the
all generation buses, considering the operating condition analyzed.
Having applied the iterative algorithm and carried out reorganiza-
tion for all branches according to the number of intermediate
buses, the nal tree matrix is given in (13).
14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14 14
13 13 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9
6 12 4 4 7 10 4 4 4 4 7 7 7 7 7
0 6 2 3 8 11 5 5 5 7 4 4 4 4 4
0 0 0 0 0 6 6 2 1 8 2 3 5 5 5
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 2 1

13
The matrix in (13) represents all of the possible paths between bus
14 and each of the generation buses (G1, G2, G3, G6 and G8).
Step two: Using distance evaluation to select the nearest genera-
tor. The nearest generator is the one for which the previously
dened electrical distance is the shortest. For this step, the com-
plex voltage at each bus of the power system is required, and this
is given by the phasor measurements or load ow solution (this
last in the case of ofine analysis) of the IEEE 14-bus system. The
distance estimations for each column of the matrix, obtained by
applying (3), are presented in Table 3.
According to the results presented in Table 3, the nearest
generator of bus 14 is the one located at the end of column one
Table 1
Matrix R
LG
for IEEE 14 bus system.
Load bus GEN1 GEN2 GEN3 GEN6 GEN8
Bus 4 0.8852 0.6255 0.7669 0.8314 0.8910
Bus 5 0.8111 0.6213 0.8566 0.7815 0.9329
Bus 7 0.9486 0.8324 0.8957 0.7774 0.5367
Bus 9 0.9509 0.8397 0.9002 0.6086 0.6816
Bus 10 0.9594 0.8675 0.9175 0.5036 0.7369
Bus 11 0.9791 0.9319 0.9576 0.2591 0.8649
Bus 12 0.9965 0.9884 0.9928 0.0448 0.9770
Bus 13 0.9929 0.9767 0.9855 0.0887 0.9538
Bus 14 0.9691 0.8993 0.9373 0.3841 0.8000
Table 2
Base case load ow results for IEEE14 bus.
Bus Magnitude voltage [p.u.] Angle voltage []
1 1.0600 0.0000
2 1.0450 4.9801
3 1.0100 12.7153
4 1.0134 10.1900
5 1.0164 8.7910
6 1.0700 14.9908
7 1.0487 14.0790
8 1.0900 14.0790
9 1.0314 16.1332
10 1.0305 16.2121
11 1.0463 15.7210
12 1.0534 15.8926
13 1.0466 15.9819
14 1.0197 17.0933
S. Prez-Londoo et al. / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 63 (2014) 806813 809
of the matrix obtained in (13). In this example, it corresponds to
generator 6, and the corresponding voltage drop is 0.0632 p.u.
Step three: Computing the VSI. According to the VSI denition, the
index for bus 14 is dened by (14):
VSI
14
t
V
i
t
V
1
i

jDV
14
tj
0:0632
16:1306 14
Using the inverse of the VSI gives a value of 0.0619, which is similar
to the proposed index, as given in (12). From the operating condi-
tion analyzed here, it is observed to be stable because the index
value is far from the unit that represents the maximum loadability
point [23].
According to the results presented above, it is observed that the
SVSI denition surpasses the VSI formulation by reducing compu-
tational costs and improving performance due to the use of the R
LG
matrix and the dened b factor.
The following section analyzes the application of the proposed
index in large power systems.
Simulation results in IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 118-bus power systems
In order to investigate the applicability of the proposed SVSI in
other power systems, simulations were carried out on IEEE 30-bus
and IEEE 118-bus systems [24]. The test performed to observe the
response of the SVSI considers heavy reactive loading and contin-
gencies (n 1) such as line outages. The obtained results were
compared to other indexes such as the L-index [9] and the VSI
[23] to validate their feasibility. All the results were obtained using
simulation tools such as PSAT [29] and Matlab. Once the power
ow was solved, the index calculation could be performed. Accord-
ing to the SVSI denition, the buses which had an SVSI index value
close to unity were termed critical buses in the analyzed power
system. Otherwise, buses with low SVSI values were assumed to
be those that had sufcient voltage stability margins.
Single load change only considering variations of reactive power
In this work, several possible alternatives of system load varia-
tions were studied and assessed. It was found that when the load
was increased in one particular bus, keeping the load at other
buses xed at base case resulted in the system coming closer to
voltage instability than in any other case [30]. Normally the voltage
stability is very sensitive to the ow of reactive power. For this rea-
son, the test results for the IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 118-bus systems
presented below, considers only heavy reactive loading at single
node.
The test was carried out at different buses, but only the cases of
buses 26, 29 and 30 for the IEEE 30 bus are illustrated because
these buses have smaller permissible reactive loading according
to [24]. For the IEEE 118 bus system, increasing the reactive load
is considered at buses 51, 20 and 79. Voltage stability indices such
as SVSI, L-index and VSI have been calculated for both power sys-
tems, taking into consideration the maximum load condition, and
these values are presented in Table 4. The critical state of a bus
is determined by the closeness of the index to unity.
It is observed that each of the considered indices increases as
the reactive power loading increases. In Table 4, the L-index and
the VSI for both power systems have lower values in comparison
to the SVSI index. This is because the proposed index takes into
account a relevant electrical quantity such as the voltage phasor
information included in the correction factor b. The high value of
the SVSI index is a consequence of the differences between voltage
buses near the voltage collapse point, which offers a high degree of
sensitivity.
A heavy reactive load value of 0.312 p.u. at bus 26 increases the
index to 1.000, showing that bus 26 is the most critical. This result
is validated by the other index, except VSI that is found to be much
less than unity. The results show that the SVSI is capable of
identifying the buses with weak voltage more accurately.
To investigate the effect of the correction factor b on the pro-
posed index, results for the load increasing at bus 30 are presented
in Fig. 3. It is observed that the proposed index surpasses the
response given by the L-index and the VSI due to the consideration
of voltage variations in the case of a high load increase.
The effect of the reactive power limits of the generators is also
shown in Fig. 3. One transition in SVSI is observed when the load
multiplier factor is equal to 3.4. At this load, the nearest generator
to bus 30 switches to PQ mode, and therefore the other generator is
determined as the closest to the analyzed load bus. In this case,
four transitions are observed for the L-index; this happens because
the L-index formulation considers all generators, in contrast to the
SVSI formulation, which only considers the nearest generator. This
is an advantage of the SVSI over the L-index, because the index is
less discontinuous in the case of low transitions.
For the IEEE 118-bus system, the heavy reactive load at bus 79
made this bus the most critical one, and its SVSI index value is
equal to unity. This result was conrmed with the L-index and
the VSI values, but these indices present values lower than that
of the SVSI; however, they indicate that bus 79 is the most critical
for the maximum load point. It is important to highlight that the
VSI has a lower value for bus 79 than the other indices, which indi-
cates that a loading margin is available. If this bus is further loaded
on the basis of this information, the system may collapse.
In conclusion, from the information in Table 4 it is evident that
the proposed index is consistent with other methodologies in
identifying the weakest bus of the analyzed power systems but
provides accurate information in certain cases.
Contingency (n 1) analysis
In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed index,
considering several operating conditions, the SVSI is calculated
under contingency (n 1) such as a line outage. Contingency
analysis is conducted by removing only one element each time.
The load ow is run with one element outage, and an SVSI value
is calculated from the solution of load ow and compared to the
L-index and VSI results.
Because bus 30 is the most critical in the IEEE 30-bus system,
according to the voltage analysis previously presented, the line
outage 2730 is performed. The results for the maximum loading
point are presented in Table 5. Additionally, the outages of the lines
connected between buses 1 and 3 and between buses 4 and 12 are
also considered.
Table 3
Electrical distance calculation from bus 14 to each generator.
Path DV
14-13-6 0.0632
14-13-12-6 0.0641
14-9-4-2 0.2270
14-9-4-3 0.1730
14-9-7-8 0.1030
14-9-10-11-6 0.0679
14-9-4-5-6 0.2780
14-9-4-5-2 0.2275
14-9-4-5-1 0.3182
14-9-4-7-8 0.2479
14-9-7-4-2 0.2390
14-9-7-4-3 0.1850
14-9-7-4-5-6 0.2901
14-9-7-4-5-2 0.2395
14-9-7-4-5-1 0.3302
810 S. Prez-Londoo et al. / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 63 (2014) 806813
Table 5 shows the critical condition of the upper branch of the
IEEE 30-bus system when line 2730 was suppressed. The stressed
condition of bus 29 is obvious from the value of the indices used in
Table 5. Also, for the outage of line 13, the critical buses are 30, 26
and 29 respectively, due to the loss of important paths between
slack buses and the load zone.
Generally, the voltage stability margin value of a power
system depends on several factors such as the load scenario,
the generation capability and the conguration of the power sys-
tem. Related to the results presented in Table 5, it is noticed that
the special topologic conguration of the IEEE 30-bus system
inuences the voltage stability of some buses. For instance,
although the outage of line 13 is considered, the most critical
buses are not those directly connected to this line. In this case,
the most critical bus is 30, because it is the farthest bus from
the generation areas.
Table 4
Voltage stability indices for 30-bus and 118-bus power systems with single reactive load increase.
Rank Bus L Bus SVSI Bus VSI
IEEE 30 bus test system
Q = 0.312 p.u at node 26
1 26 0.9005 26 1.000 26 0.7978
2 30 0.5181 30 0.5969 30 0.4690
3 25 0.4907 29 0.5540 29 0.4353
4 29 0.4832 25 0.5505 25 0.4325
5 27 0.4310 27 0.4908 27 0.3857
Q = 0.349 p.u at node 29
1 29 0.8874 29 0.9934 29 0.7918
2 30 0.7904 30 0.8890 30 0.7085
3 27 0.5078 27 0.5644 27 0.4498
4 26 0.5022 26 0.5617 26 0.4476
5 25 0.4662 25 0.5206 25 0.4149
Q = 0.324 p.u at node 30
1 30 0.8847 30 0.9902 30 0.7912
2 29 0.6415 29 0.7119 29 0.5688
3 26 0.4670 26 0.5220 27 0.4171
4 27 0.4651 27 0.5161 26 0.4124
5 25 0.4347 25 0.4856 25 0.3880
IEEE 118 bus test system
Q = 3.34 p.u at node 51
1 51 0.8142 51 0.9956 51 0.7462
2 52 0.6686 52 0.7832 52 0.5991
3 58 0.4346 58 0.4939 58 0.3778
4 53 0.3228 53 0.3458 53 0.2645
5 56 0.1518 50 0.2463 50 0.1884
Q = 6.112 p.u at node 79
1 79 0.8072 79 1.0000 79 0.7813
2 78 0.4405 78 0.5463 78 0.4261
3 77 0.293 76 0.3985 77 0.3108
4 76 0.289 77 0.3641 80 0.2841
5 118 0.2394 118 0.3447 76 0.2689
Q = 2.05 p.u at node 20
1 20 0.805 20 0.9971 20 0.7618
2 21 0.5601 21 0.6958 21 0.5316
3 22 0.3202 22 0.3876 22 0.2962
4 19 0.1761 19 0.1815 19 0.1387
5 18 0.12 102 0.1709 18 0.1306
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
Load multiplier factor
I
n
d
e
x
VSI
SVSI
L
Fig. 3. Evolution of SVSI and L-index until a reactive load increase at load node 30.
S. Prez-Londoo et al. / Electrical Power and Energy Systems 63 (2014) 806813 811
For the IEEE 118-bus system, some of the most stressed lines
were obtained from [24], where the contingency ranking is pre-
sented. The test results of several line outages performed on the
IEEE 118-bus system are presented in Table 5.
Two aspects of the IEEE 118-bus system are highlighted in
Table 5:
(a) During the analyzed outages, none of the contingencies rep-
resented a critical stability condition of the power system,
due to the low values obtained for the proposed index.
(b) One line outage does not necessarily affect the directly con-
nected lines (in terms of voltage stability). For instance, from
Table 5, line outage L38-65 makes bus 44 the most critical
one. According to the power system topology, this bus is
not close to the removed line.
These two aspects can be justied due to the meshed topology of
the IEEE 118-bus system. This allows for the improvement of voltage
stability because the power system presents multiple paths to each
specic bus. This contrasts with the IEEE 30-bus power system,
where the topology is less meshed; this is reected in the stability
condition of the buses, as in the case of contingencies (see Table 5).
From the analyzed contingencies, the obtained results for both
systems are similar considering the three methodologies studied,
and therefore the proposed index can be used as part of a voltage
monitoring tool for power systems.
Conclusions
In this paper a new voltage stability index, SVSI, was described
and proposed for voltage stability analysis. According to the
obtained results, this index can be used satisfactorily to predict
voltage stability by using the information given by the actual mon-
itoring power systems (the voltage phasors at all busses of the
power system, the status of the generators and the topology of
the power system).
Two test power systems were used to verify the proposed index,
and the results were discussed and compared to those obtained
with other indices, considering some special operating conditions
of the analyzed power systems. The results show that the proposed
index has some advantages over other indices. First, the proposed
SVSI is more sensitive than the L-index due to the correction factor
proposed when a voltage collapse is likely; the SVSI is also less dis-
continuous than the L-index and can be of great utility when online
applications are considered. Second, the RED concept, used to
select the nearest generator to a specic load bus, enhances the
originally proposed voltage stability index by reducing the compu-
tation time and resources needed. Finally, these advantages mean
that the SVSI index can be applied in online supervisory tasks for
power systems.
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Voltage stability indices of critical nodes for 30-bus and 118-bus power system until
line outage.
Line outage from-to Rank Bus L Bus SVSI Bus VSI
IEEE 30 bus test system
2730 1 30 0.9298 30 0.9789 30 0.8702
2 29 0.7126 29 0.7463 29 0.6635
3 26 0.5866 26 0.6110 26 0.4791
4 24 0.5472 24 0.5718 25 0.5084
5 19 0.5460 19 0.5715 27 0.5080
13 1 30 0.8669 30 0.8821 30 0.8100
2 26 0.8142 26 0.8243 26 0.7570
3 29 0.8089 29 0.8222 29 0.7551
4 19 0.7813 19 0.7922 19 0.7275
5 24 0.7785 24 0.7892 24 0.7247
412 1 14 0.8178 14 0.8322 14 0.7828
2 15 0.7924 15 0,8059 15 0.7581
3 12 0.7901 12 0,8050 18 0.7572
4 18 0.7639 18 0,7761 23 0.7301
5 23 0.7567 13 0,7696 12 0.7222
IEEE 118 bus test system
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2 76 0.4315 76 0.4201 76 0.3716
3 74 0.1339 74 0.3375 77 0.2899
4 43 0.1246 70 0.3276 78 0.2801
5 1 0.1194 75 0.2912 79 0.2590
3865 1 44 0.2168 44 0.8507 44 0.5919
2 43 0.2002 45 0.6285 45 0.4551
3 76 0.1946 70 0.4833 43 0.4167
4 118 0.1906 118 0.4268 74 0.4167
5 45 0.1842 75 0.3877 118 0.4019
7677 1 76 0.3974 76 0.6376 76 0.6017
2 118 0.3283 118 0.5608 118 0.5293
3 74 0.2158 74 0.4645 75 0.4384
4 75 0.2154 75 0.4373 74 0.4127
5 43 0.1729 70 0.4138 70 0.3905
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