On the Dynamics and Statics of Power System Operation : Optimal Utilization of FACTS Devicesand Management of Wind Power Uncertainty

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, power systems are dealing with some new challenges raisedby the major changes that have been taken place since 80’s, e.g., deregu-lation in electricity markets, significant increase of electricity demands andmore recently large-scale integration of renewable energy resources such aswind power. Therefore, system operators must make some adjustments toaccommodate these changes into the future of power systems.One of the main challenges is maintaining the system stability since theextra stress caused by the above changes reduces the stability margin, andmay lead to rise of many undesirable phenomena. The other important chal-lenge is to cope with uncertainty and variability of renewable energy sourceswhich make power systems to become more stochastic in nature, and lesscontrollable.Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) have emerged as a solutionto help power systems with these new challenges. This thesis aims to ap-propriately utilize such devices in order to increase the transmission capacityand flexibility, improve the dynamic behavior of power systems and integratemore renewable energy into the system. To this end, the most appropriatelocations and settings of these controllable devices need to be determined.This thesis mainly looks at (i) rotor angle stability, i.e., small signal andtransient stability (ii) system operation under wind uncertainty. In the firstpart of this thesis, trajectory sensitivity analysis is used to determine themost suitable placement of FACTS devices for improving rotor angle sta-bility, while in the second part, optimal settings of such devices are foundto maximize the level of wind power integration. As a general conclusion,it was demonstrated that FACTS devices, installed in proper locations andtuned appropriately, are effective means to enhance the system stability andto handle wind uncertainty.The last objective of this thesis work is to propose an efficient solutionapproach based on Benders’ decomposition to solve a network-constrained acunit commitment problem in a wind-integrated power system. The numericalresults show validity, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach.