IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 31, NO.
4, JULY 2016
Estimating the Voltage Stability Margin Using
PMU Measurements
Heng-Yi Su, Member, IEEE, and Chih-Wen Liu, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—This paper presents a new method based on phasor
measurement units (PMUs) for the estimation of voltage stability
margin in a power system to increase operator's situational aware-
ness. The method assumes a PMU measurement preprocessing
technique as a priori in order to eliminate data inconsistency and
uncertainty caused by random load disturbances. The measure-
ments are then used in the computation of voltage stability margin
based on the coupled single-port Thevenin equivalent model and
the cubic spline extrapolation technique. Moreover, some practical
operating constraints such as the generator reactive power limits
are taken into account for practical assessment of the method's
performance. Extensive case studies conducted on several stan-
dard IEEE test systems are used to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the proposed method.
Index Terms—Phasor measurement unit (PMU), voltage sta-
bility, voltage stability margin, wide-area measurement system
(WAMS).
I. INTRODUCTION
V OLTAGE instability has always been a crucial concern
by power system engineers over the past two decades.
Significant research efforts have been devoted to understanding
voltage instability phenomenon and proposing corresponding
countermeasures [1], [2]. The phenomenon of voltage insta-
bility is caused by an uncontrollable drop in system voltage after
being subjected to a disturbance. This deterioration may ulti-
mately result in voltage collapse that has been responsible for
several blackout incidents throughout the world [3]. No matter
how infrequent power system blackout is, this may charge ad-
ditional cost, and everyone would always be affected.
Voltage stability is an essential dynamic phenomenon. How-
ever, a large portion of the research studies has been focused on
the steady-state aspects of voltage stability [4]. In spite of the
fact that the static analysis is simple, it still provides some prac-
tical advantages over the dynamic analysis, and an example is
to give results with acceptable accuracy and little computational
effort [5]. In this paper, the main concern is static voltage sta-
bility analysis.
Manuscript received April 23, 2015; revised July 29, 2015; accepted
September 03, 2015. Date of publication September 30, 2015; date of current
version May 02, 2016. This work was supported in part by the Ministry
of Science and Technology of Taiwan, R.O.C., under Contract MOST
103-2221-E-035-101 and Contract MOST 104-3113-E-002-013. Paper no.
TPWRS-00562-2015.
H.-Y. Su is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Feng Chia Uni-
versity, Taichung 40724, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail: hengyisu@fcu.edu.tw).
C.-W. Liu is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan
University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan, R.O.C. (e-mail: liucw@ntu.edu.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRS.2015.2477426
0885-8950 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
3221
In order to measure steady-state voltage stability of a power
system, the concept of voltage stability margin (VSM) has been
proposed to demonstrate the closeness of the current operating
point to the point of voltage collapse [6]. A review of litera-
ture reveals that there are different kinds of technique for VSM
evaluation, such as sensitivity [7], [8], singular value decompo-
sition [9], [10], and continuation power flow (CPFLOW) [11],
[12] method. Among those model-based approaches, CPFLOW
based methods are widely used to trace a solution path from any
given operating point to voltage-collapse point. Since model-
based tools require a lot of computation time for a buck power
system model, they may not be applied in the field of real-time
applications in practical power systems; therefore, an alterna-
tive approach is required.
With increasing deployment of phasor measurement units
(PMUs) on transmission systems, PMU-based wide area
measurement system (WAMS) has already attracted lots of
concerns from the academia and industry [13]. PMU-based
WAMS is able to provide time-synchronized measurements
in both voltage and current phasors over wide areas. Each
measured data from PMU is time-stamped based on a common
time reference with a high precision provided by global po-
sitioning system (GPS). According to the time stamps and
sample numbers, the collected phasor data are synchronized
and correlated. The real-time, accurate, and time-aligned phasor
measurements enable to create a precise snapshot of the power
system; therefore, WAMS is introduced to perform a wide
range of applications [14]. Recently, some online tools using
PMU measurements have been successfully applied to voltage
stability analysis, such as regression tree [15], relationships
exploration [16], channel components transform [17], and
modified coupled single-port model [18]. Indeed, most of the
measurement-based methods are the impedance match methods
[18]–[25]. Such approaches are based on an estimated Thevenin
equivalent network behind a load bus. The works [19]–[24]
handle such problem by using a single-port model. To improve
the performance of the single-port model under multiple load
change scenario, an innovative method based on the coupled
single-port model was proposed in [25]. An extension of [25]
was proposed in [18] to modify the couple single-port model by
introducing a mitigation factor for measurement-based voltage
stability assessment.
In recent years, many measurement-based approaches have
been proposed to determine voltage stability of a power system.
However, to the author's knowledge, most of them do not
consider generator reactive power limits. Under these circum-
stances, the performances of these methods would be severely
degraded.
3222 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 31, NO. 4, JULY 2016

In this context, the contribution of this paper is the de-

velopment of a new approach to estimate the maximum
loading point, considering the generator reactive power limits,
for real-time voltage stability monitoring. To this end, the
PMU-based WAMS technology is employed to improve
voltage stability monitoring through the increased situational
awareness of system operators. In the proposed method, the
coupled single-port Thevenin equivalent model and the cubic
spline extrapolation technique are used to determine the point
of voltage collapse. Furthermore, the developed method is
able to handle limits violation cases by calculating an index Fig. 1. Coupled single-port circuit used in [18] and [25]: an extra impedance
is used to represent coupling effects of other loads.
which measures the extreme reactive power of each generator
for a given load increase direction; therefore, it is suitable for
practical use. where
The succeeding sections of this paper are organized as
follows: Section II reviews the main concepts of coupled (7)
single-port circuit and impedance match method. The proposed
(8)
method for real-time voltage stability monitoring is presented
in Section III. Numerical examples and results are illustrated in is called the impedance matrix and can be obtained from the
Section IV. Concluding remarks are drawn in Section V. system admittance matrix . For a specific load bus , we have
II. PRELIMINARIES
This section gives a brief overview of the coupled single- (9)
port circuit and reviews the concept of impedance match for the
estimation of the maximum loading point.
where is the diagonal element of and is the
A. Coupled Single-Port Circuit element of . Note that the third term in (9) denotes the coupling
A general multi-node network for a power system can be effects of other loads on bus .
converted into a multi-branch Thevenin equivalent circuit. To Several methods were proposed to model such coupling term
start with, consider the standard node-voltage equation in ma- while maintaining the single-port structure [18], [25]. The liter-
trix from ature [25] employs an extra impedance, which is called the vir-
tual impedance, to represent the coupling effects of other loads,
(1) as shown in Fig. 1. To improve the coupled single-port circuit
under the cases when loads in different areas increase at dif-
where is the vector of the injected bus currents, is the vector ferent rates and keep their power factors constant, a modified
of bus voltages, and is known as the system admittance ma- coupled single-port circuit is developed [18]. Specifically, a mit-
trix. The system buses are generally classified into three types: igation factor , which is derived from the extended Ward-type
generator bus , load bus , and tie bus which has no equivalent, is introduced to modify the Thevenin equivalent pa-
generator or load. Thus, expanding (1) leads to the expression rameters, i.e.,

(2)

Since the current vector entering the tie bus is equal to zero, (10)
can be written as
Notice that and can be calculated from two con-
(3) secutive PMU measured data [18]. Observations from a great
amount of simulations under the cases with proportional load in-
Rearranging (3) gives crease, , which means that the modified coupled single-
port model is approximately equal to the coupled single-port
(4) model when the loads of the whole system increase at the same
rate and keep their power factors constant.
Substituting for in (2) yields
B. Impedance Match Concept
Most of the measurement-based methods rely on impedance
(5)
match theorem to identify voltage instability or the proximity to
Equation (5) can be rearranged as voltage collapse. A key idea of these methods can be summa-
rized as follows. When maximum loading condition occurs at a
(6) load bus, the Thevenin equivalent circuit satisfies the following
SU AND LIU: ESTIMATING THE VOLTAGE STABILITY MARGIN USING PMU MEASUREMENTS 3223

Fig. 2. Coupled single-port Thevenin equivalent model used in this paper: an

extra voltage source is used to represent coupling effects of other loads. Fig. 3. Trajectories of and as a function of load parameter . At
is identical to .
criterion:
where and are the load voltage and current phaosrs. In
this study, we assume that the data points of and are
(11) available from PMU measurements. In addition, the load model
considered in this research is the constant PQ model.
In other words, voltage collapse takes place when the impedance
match theory holds. That is, the critical point at voltage collapse B. Cubic Spline Extrapolation Technique
is also the point in which the maximum available power can
be delivered to the load. Based on this fact, a new method to Fig. 3 depicts the trajectories of and as a function
estimate the maximum loading point by using the extrapolation of load parameter for the Thevenin's network of Fig. 2. When
technique is proposed. The details are given in Section III.B. the maximum power transfer takes place, the impedance match
theory holds. Therefore, the estimation of the maximum loading
III. PROPOSED METHOD point at load bus , denoted by , can be made by equating
an approximate function that extrapolates the trajectory of ,
In this section, a PMU-based approach to real-time voltage
to be .
stability margin estimation is proposed. It is necessary to filter
In this study, the cubic spline extrapolation method is uti-
out unwanted random load induced dynamics and errors from
lized as the function approximation. The reason why cubic
PMU measurements before performing the proposed voltage
spline function is used as an extrapolation function is that
stability margin computation. To this aim, one can use filtering
this function fits the impedance trajectory quite well based on
techniques such as the published methods [26], [27] to create
observed extensive simulation results. The fundamental idea
‘clean’ measurements. These data preprocessing techniques are
behind constructing a spline function is to divide the interval
not addressed here. Instead, we focus on the method of voltage
into a collection of subintervals and construct a different ap-
stability margin computation using assumed ‘clean’ PMU mea-
proximating low-order polynomial in each subinterval. In cubic
surements. The proposed method is able to deal with the cases
splines, third-order polynomials are used for interpolation in the
which cause generators reaching their reactive power limits. The
subintervals between each successive pair of data points (the
techniques used in the proposed method are described in the fol-
points are connected with curves). Thus, the curves obtained
lowing subsections.
from each subinterval are smooth.
A. Coupled Single-Port Thevenin Equivalent Model With an For given points, there are subintervals, the mathe-
Extra Voltage Source matical formula of the polynomial in the th subinterval is given
by
The proposed method is based on the coupled single-port
Thevenin equivalent circuit. Fig. 2 illustrates the circuit rep- (14)
resentation of (9), in which the coupling term is modeled by
an extra voltage source. Thus, the Thevenin equivalent voltage for each . Overall, there are equations,
and Thevenin equivalent impedance at the th load bus can be and since each equation has four coefficients, a total of
expressed as coefficients have to be determined. The coefficients
are found by applying the following conditions [28]:

(12)

From (12), it is obvious that the Thevenin equivalent impedance

remains the same if there are no changes in system topologies
and bus types. Based on (12), a coupled single-port Thevenin
equivalent model as viewed from the load bus can be acquired. (15)
Referring to Fig. 2, the load impedance is given by
Cubic splines with the boundary conditions given in part (f) of
the definition are called clamped cubic splines. Applying all the
(13) conditions gives a system of
3224 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 31, NO. 4, JULY 2016

linear equations for the coefficients. The system of linear Consider the current entering the typical bus of the power
equations that has to be solved for the coefficient is given by system is given by (1). Expressing (1) in polar form, we have

(20)

where is the bus admittance matrix;

(16)
represents the bus voltage; and stands for the total
where and . Once the values number of buses in a power system. In the above equation,
of are determined, it is a simple matter to find the remainder includes . The complex power at bus is
of the constants , and by
(21)

Substituting from (20) for in (21), the reactive power at gen-

erator bus can be expressed as
(17)

Details on how to determine the coefficients in (14) are pre-

sented in [28].
In this work, the inputs to the cubic spline extrapolation func-
tion are 3 sets of and and the point of at which (22)
is to be extrapolated. The output from the function is the
extrapolated value at the given point. Since the impedance
matches when the maximum power transfer occurs, the func- where is the imaginary part of the diagonal
tion is then used for determining the extrapolated value of for elements of the bus admittance matrix. For the sake of illustra-
. In other words, the output from the function is tion, assume that , (22) reduces to
the estimated maximum loading point at the th load bus.
In general, the estimated maximum loading point from (23)
each load bus is different. According to [25], the bus with the
smallest maximum loading point among all load buses is the where is the reactance of the transmission line. In a typ-
weakest bus in the power system, i.e., the smallest maximum ical power system, , and the resistance may be ne-
loading point, denoted by , can be utilized to represent the glected. In this case, . Replacing in (23) with
maximum loading point of the entire power grid: results in

(18)

where represents the number of load buses in a power

system. which can be reordered as
Like many of the existing measurement-based methods that
employ several consecutive PMU measurements for real-time (24)
voltage stability margin estimation, the one proposed in this
paper uses three consecutive PMU measurements (three sets of Indeed, the above equation defines a surface in the
calculated and ) to estimate the maximum loading point. space. Cutting this surface with constant power
With the estimated maximum loading point, the voltage sta- factor planes, the curves, which are similar to the
bility margin can be determined. A widely accepted measure curves (or curves), except that normal operating points
of voltage stability monitoring is expressed by the load power now lie on the lower part of the curves, can be obtained [2].
margin which is defined to be the distance between the current Since the approximate quadratic property of the curve of
operating point and system maximum loading point . the load bus [29], [30], the curve can be represented by a
Thus, the system voltage stability margin (VSM) defined by the quadratic curve. According to this, the curve can be
percentage of the load power margin is approximately modeled by

% (19) (25)

where , and are parameters to be determined. Using

C. Consideration of Generator Reactive Power Limits 3 sets of and , the system of (26) is obtained and the 3
parameters can be computed by
An index, which measures the extreme reactive power of
each generator for a given load increase direction, is introduced
first. Afterward, a new algorithm based on PMU measurements
to cope with the cases with generator limits violation is (26)
presented.
SU AND LIU: ESTIMATING THE VOLTAGE STABILITY MARGIN USING PMU MEASUREMENTS 3225

TABLE I
RESULTS OF THE IDENTIFICATION OF LIMITS VIOLATION AT PV BUS
(“#”INDICATES
“NUMBER”)

where the number between parenthesis in (26) denotes the time

index of three consecutive PMU measurements. It should be em-
phasized that the time span between two consecutive measure-
ments is not the high sampling rate of PMU such as 1 cycle. In-
stead, the time span, which varies from several seconds to min-
utes according to the prevailing dynamics of load variation of a
specific power system [31], is acceptable to serve the purpose
of the proposed method.
With the values of , and , an estimate of the extreme
value of is derived from setting , i.e.,

(27)

for each , and represents the number of

generator buses in a power system. Let and be the
lower and upper bounds of the th generator reactive power
output, respectively. For a given load increase direction, if there
is no generator limits violation at PV bus , then Fig. 4. Flowchart of the proposed method for voltage stability margin
. On the other hand, when or estimation.
, generator limits are encountered at PV bus
. Thus, the value of can be utilized as an indicator for
identifying -limit violation. That is, after the execution of this 1) Given the network admittance matrix and three sets of
method for , a list of limits violation , and calculated from PMU measurements;
at PV buses is created. 2) Compute the parameters of , and for each
In order to verify the accuracy and effectiveness of the pro- by (26);
posed method for identifying generator limits violation, we 3) Compute by (27);
have studied a lot of test cases. These include different test sys- 4) If there is no generator reactive power limits violation, then
tems, different load levels, different load patterns, and various go to step 6. Otherwise, go to step 5;
-limit violations. The correctness of the results was confirmed 5) Change the bus type from PV bus to PQ bus for the gener-
by running the CPFLOW software package of PSAT [32]. The ator reaching its limits;
selected simulation results among those test cases are presented 6) Compute impedance matrix by (7);
in Table I, in which the third column represents the results ob- 7) Compute by (12);
tained by the CPFLOW method. An inspection of this table 8) Estimate by using the cubic
clearly states that the results given by the proposed method co- spline extrapolation technique according to Section III.B;
incide with the results obtained by the CPFLOW method. 9) Find ;
In this work, we assume that PMUs are placed optimally 10) Determine VSM by (19).
based on one of the methods proposed in [13]; therefore, the To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the
entire system becomes observable. In this case, time-synchro- experiments have been conducted with respect to various IEEE
nized voltage and current phasors at each bus are available. In test systems, load conditions, and -limit violations. Among
other words, the values of , and can be estimated those simulation studies, Fig. 5 shows some selected case
from PMU measurements. results for the most critical bus 30 on the IEEE 30-bus system.
Fig. 4 shows the flowchart of the proposed algorithm with Fig. 5(a) depicts the case without limits violation, while
consideration of generator reactive power limits for voltage sta- Fig. 5(b) to (d) depict the cases with limits violation, in which
bility margin estimation. The main steps are as follows. the sharp jumps in coincide with the generator reaching
3226 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 31, NO. 4, JULY 2016

Fig. 6. Estimation of for the IEEE 300-bus system: , the

actual .

TABLE III
SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION SCENARIO I AND SIMULATION SCENARIO II
Fig. 5. Estimation of at bus 30 for the IEEE 30-bus system. (a) Case 1:
estimated ; actual . (b) Case 2: estimated
; actual . (c) Case 3: estimated
; actual . (d) Case 4: estimated ; ac-
tual .

TABLE II
SIMULATION SCENARIOS FOR THE TEST SYSTEM (“PR” INDICATES
“PERCENTAGE RATE”)

its capacity limits. From Fig. 5, it reveals that the estimated

maximum loading points are very close to the actual ones.

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined on
three commonly used power networks, namely IEEE 30-, 118-,
and 300-bus power systems. The system data including line pa-
rameters and bus data are given in [33]. The scenarios, which
are conducted in the simulations, are summarized in Table II.
The experiments are implemented in MATLAB and run on a
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz computer with 4 GB of RAM.
The performance measure utilized in this research is defined
as
% (28)
where is the VSM determined by the proposed method and
is the actual VSM obtained by the use of the CPFLOW soft-
ware package of PSAT [32]. In addition, for each test system in
this study, it is simply assumed that the necessary PMU mea-
surements are available at all generator and load buses, i.e., the
points of , and can be calculated from PMU mea-
sured data.
A lot of test cases on several IEEE test systems have been
studied. Fig. 6 shows a typical case of the proposed method
for the estimation of . From the shown figure, it is clearly
seen that , which is the smallest one among
, is very close to the actual
.
In this study, the authors have performed many simulation
examples with respect to different load levels, different load
patterns, and different -limit violations. Among those in-
vestigated cases, several test results for the scenarios given
in Table III are briefly summarized. Moreover, the simulation
results obtained are all compared with those found by the
method [18] and method [25]. More details are presented and
discussed in the following examples.
A. IEEE 30-Bus System
The first test system is concerned with the IEEE 30-bus
system which is composed of 41 branches, 6 generators, and
24 loads [33].
In the first phase of the simulation, loads are increased with
the same percentage rate, i.e., all the loads in the IEEE 30-bus
system are increased simultaneously based on their initial load
levels. In order to examine the effect of generator reactive power
limits on voltage stability monitoring, a lot of -limit violation
cases have been studied. Table IV shows the estimations of the
voltage stability margin VSM via the proposed method, method
[18], and method [25] for the selected cases. In Table IV, it
SU AND LIU: ESTIMATING THE VOLTAGE STABILITY MARGIN USING PMU MEASUREMENTS
TABLE IV
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD
[18], AND METHOD [25] UNDER THE SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION
SCENARIO I FOR THE IEEE 30-BUS SYSTEM
TABLE V
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD
[18], AND METHOD [25] UNDER THE SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION
SCENARIO II FOR THE IEEE 30-BUS SYSTEM
apparently indicates that both the method [18] and method [25]
have approximately the same results under the scenarios with
proportional load increase. Also, due to the impact of limits
violation, the values of VSM estimated by the method [18] and
method [25] are much higher. On the contrary, the points of
VSM given by the proposed method (with considering generator
limits) are very close to the actual ones.
In the second phase of the simulation, loads are increased
with different percentage rate at different load buses. Mean-
while, generator limits are considered during the simulations.
The estimations of VSM under the selected cases by the three
compared methods are shown in Table V. Since loads are not
increased proportionally in these cases, the mismatch of the re-
sult provided by the method [25] is much greater than that of
the result calculated by the method [18]. Comparing the esti-
mated VSM for each case in Table V, it is clearly seen that the
proposed method is able to provide the results with acceptable
accuracy.
B. IEEE 118-Bus System
In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method,
the IEEE 118-bus system is used as an example. This sample
system consists of 186 transmission lines, 54 generators, and
64 loads [33].
A series of simulations with respect to different system con-
ditions, loading conditions, and -limit violations on the IEEE
118-bus system has been carried out. The selected simulation
results among those cases are presented as follows.
Table VI shows the comparison with VSM for the selected
cases under the simulation scenario I. From Table VI, it is
clearly seen that the errors of VSM obtained by the proposed
method are within a relatively small range. However, the errors
of VSM computed by the method [18] and method [25] are
much greater. Another selected test results for the simulation
scenario II are shown in Table VII. The results evidently show
3227
TABLE VI
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD
[18], AND METHOD [25] UNDER THE SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION
SCENARIO I FOR THE IEEE 118-BUS SYSTEM
TABLE VII
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD
[18], AND METHOD [25] UNDER THE SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION
SCENARIO II FOR THE IEEE 118-BUS SYSTEM
TABLE VIII
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD
[18], AND METHOD [25] UNDER THE SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION
SCENARIO I FOR THE IEEE 300-BUS SYSTEM
that the proposed method performs better than that of the
method [18] and method [25].
C. IEEE 300-Bus System
The IEEE 300-bus system is also used as a test model to
demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method to buck
power systems. This simulated system is composed of 411
branches, 69 generators, and 231 loads [33].
In order to evaluate the performance of the presented method-
ology to power system voltage stability monitoring, we have
studied a lot of test cases. These include different load levels
and load patterns. Furthermore, generator reactive power limits
are considered in each simulation run.
The comparisons with the selected cases for the simulation
scenario I and simulation scenario II are listed in Tables VIII and
IX, respectively. From these tables, it is once again proven that
the proposed method is capable of offering acceptable accuracy
of results, compared with the results obtained by the method
[18] and method [25].
D. Statistical Evaluation
A series of simulations with respect to different test sys-
tems, different load levels, different load patterns, and various
3228
TABLE IX
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON BETWEEN THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD
[18], AND METHOD [25] UNDER THE SELECTED CASES OF SIMULATION
SCENARIO II FOR THE IEEE 300-BUS SYSTEM
TABLE X
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD [18], AND
METHOD [25] UNDER 500 TEST CASES FOR THE SIMULATION SCENARIO I
TABLE XI
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE PROPOSED METHOD, METHOD [18], AND
METHOD [25] UNDER 500 TEST CASES FOR THE SIMULATION SCENARIO II
generator -limit violations has been carried out. The statistical
results are summarized as below.
The results under 500 simulation runs for each simulation
scenario defined in Table II are listed in Tables X and XI, re-
spectively. From the shown tables, it is clearly observed that
the errors provided by the proposed method are much smaller
than the results obtained by the method [18] and method [25].
In other words, the proposed method is superior over the method
[18] and method [25].
In addition, based on the observations from extensive simula-
tions on the IEEE power systems that range from small systems
to bulk systems, one can see that the values of estimated
by the proposed method are almost precise but a little less than
the actual values. In other words, the VSM determined by the
proposed method is relatively accurate and conservative. From
system operators' point of view, however, a little conservative
information is better than that of the optimistic one, particularly
in increasing voltage stability monitoring situational awareness.
E. Effects of Measurement Errors
Measured data from PMUs may introduce errors. To inves-
tigate the impact of measurement errors on voltage stability
margin estimation, the authors have performed many simulation
examples by simply adding a random noise to original PMU
measurements. Furthermore, an important criteria, namely the
total vector error provided by PMUs, should be less than 1%
based on the IEEE standard [34].
Table XII summarizes the simulation results under 500 test
cases for the simulation scenario I. Extensive simulation studies
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 31, NO. 4, JULY 2016
TABLE XII
EFFECTS OF MEASUREMENT ERRORS TO VSM ESTIMATION UNDER 500 TEST
CASES FOR THE SIMULATION SCENARIO I
TABLE XIII
RESULTS OF THE POST-CONTINGENCY CASE FOR THE IEEE 30-BUS TEST
SYSTEM
verify that measurement inaccuracies indeed degrade the perfor-
mance of the voltage stability monitoring method utilizing PMU
raw data. The problem of data pre-processing can be solved by
use of some filtering techniques [26], [27].
F. Effects of Post-Contingency Cases
The topology changes, which are simulated in this research,
are the post-contingency cases. The considered N-1 contingency
situations are outages of branches, where all possible branch
outages are simulated except the only branches connected to a
generator bus.
Due to limited space, the selected simulation results for the
IEEE 30-bus system are presented in Table XIII. An inspection
of this table clearly observes that the proposed method still pro-
vides acceptable results even under post-contingency cases.
V. CONCLUSION
A method, which employs PMU measurements to estimate
the voltage stability margin in real-time, is proposed. This
method takes into account the generator limits for practical
operation. It also aims to advance wide-area situational aware-
ness enhanced with voltage stability monitoring. That is, with
this new method, power system operators are able to rapidly
recognize how far the system is away from a possible insta-
bility event. Numerical examples for various IEEE benchmark
systems have been carried out. The test results are promising
and the effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed.
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[1] P. Kundur, Power System Stability and Control. New York, NY,
USA: McGraw-Hill, 1994.
SU AND LIU: ESTIMATING THE VOLTAGE STABILITY MARGIN USING PMU MEASUREMENTS
[2] T. Van Cutsem and C. Vournas, Voltage Stability of Electric Power
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Heng-Yi Su (S'12–M'15) was born in Taipei, Taiwan,
ROC, in 1980. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. de-
grees in electrical engineering from National Taiwan
University, Taipei, Taiwan, in 2005 and 2014, respec-
tively.
Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of electrical
engineering with Feng Chia University, Taichung,
Taiwan. His research interests include applications of
PMUs to power system voltage stability monitoring
and control.
Chih-Wen Liu (S'93–M'96–SM'02–F'13) received
the B.S. degree from National Taiwan University,
Taipei, Taiwan, in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA,
in 1992 and 1994, respectively, all in electrical
engineering.
Since 1994, he has been with the Department of
Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University,
Taipei, Taiwan, where he is currently a University
Distinguished Professor. His main research interests
include applications of information/communication
technology (ICT) to power system monitoring, protection, and control.