Wind penetration level studies on Texas grid stability using synchronized phase measurement

Wind power generation influences on the quality of the power grid. Because wind velocity is consistently changing this change causes unstable wind power generation. Since more wind power is expected to be used in the future, it is crucial to study the influence of the wind penetration level on normalized-damping ratio and damped-resonant frequency. In this thesis three types of calculated data were used to analyze the effect of wind penetration level on the Texas power grid: the percentage of wind power generation in Texas, generator-unit trip damping coefficient, and damped-resonant frequency. The percentage of wind energy was calculated from wind data provided by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. The damping coefficient and damped-resonant frequency values are the indicators of power system stability and were calculated from synchronized phase data from the Texas power grid. The synchronized phase measurements were collected from the University of Texas at Austin and the wind farm near the Mc-Donald observatory. The data analyzed in this paper were from September 2009 to February 2010. The wind data were correlated to the grid-stability indicators which allowed us to interpret the status of the power grid according to the wind penetration level. When the wind penetration level increased over 11 %, five generator trip events occurred with damping coefficient values ten times higher than those of the regular unit trips. Moreover, during those events, damped-resonant frequency values rose nearly four times higher than the frequency values of other events. The results of this study may lead us to the conclusion that simply increasing the capacity of wind power generation will cause the power system to become unstable, and this will result in low quality of electricity. Therefore, further study is needed to determine the optimum amount of wind power generation without causing instability in the power grid.