PMU Placement for Voltage Stability Assessment and

Monitoring of Power Systems

Xiaoming Mou, Weixing Li, Member, IEEE, and Zhimin Li
Department of Electrical Engineering
Harbin Institute of Technology
Harbin, China


AbstractThe use of PMUs is proving an important basis for
online voltage stability assessment and monitoring. Due to the
relatively high costs, it is essential to investigate the possibility
and method to reduce the number of PMUs. This paper first
introduces an analytical equivalent circuit and approach for
online voltage stability assessment. Second, an analytical index is
proposed to calculate the factors to influence the system voltage
stability. Finally, a PMU placement method is proposed to
reduce the number of PMUs and to determine their locations for
online voltage stability assessment and monitoring. Case studies
have been conducted on the IEEE 30 bus system, and the results
show that only few buses with heavy loads have big impacts on
the system voltage stability, which verifies the effectiveness of
the proposed PMU placement method.
KeywordsPower systems, voltage stability, PMU placement,
network equivalent
I. INTRODUCTION
Owing to the increasing demand for electrical power
and economic, technical and environmental concerns,
todays power systems are facing a growing pressure on
transmission transfer limits. As a result, voltage instability
has become one of the most common causes of major
blackouts occurred in recent years. Furthermore, the
increasingly high penetration of renewable energy sources
is making power systems to face a stricter challenge of
voltage stability.
In the last decades, voltage stability has been receiving
considerable attention, and a large number of methods
have been proposed for voltage stability assessment and
monitoring [1]. In general, voltage stability assessment
methods may be divided into two classifications: one is
based on system-wide measurements; the other is to use
local measurements only.
In recent years, due to the development and application
of synchronized phasor measurement technologies, more
considerable research work was focused on various local
measurement-based methods for online voltage stability
assessment [2-10]. With such methods, power system is
usually reduced to a simple Thevenin equivalent circuit,
and then a set of PMU voltage and current phasors on a
load bus are measured to solve the equivalent parameters.
Such methods appear to be very attractive because of the
simplicity and feasibility for implementation. However,
the main challenge is in the estimation of the Thevenin
equivalent parameters. In practical power systems, it is
usually difficult or even impossible to adequately estimate
the Thevenin equivalent parameters using single bus data
only.
This paper is to present an analytical equivalent circuit
and approach for online voltage stability assessment of
power systems. Such a method involves the measurements
for all load bus. So, it is an important issue to investigate
the possibility and method to reduce the number of PMUs,
without decreasing the accuracy of the proposed method
for voltage stability assessment.
In the literature, the placement of PMUs has been
extensively discussed. Most existing methods formulated
the PMU placement as an optimization problem with the
objective to ensure power system observability. Only few
literatures discussed the PMU placement problem for
voltage stability assessment and monitoring. In [11], a
discrete particle swarm optimization method was proposed
to determine the optimal number and locations of PMUs
for voltage stability monitoring. In [12], a decision tree
method was proposed for optimal PMU placement for
voltage stability assessment. In [13], a branch and bound
algorithm was developed to solve the PMU placement
problem to improve the performance of secondary voltage
control.
In this paper, an analytical index is proposed to
calculate the factors to influence the system voltage
stability. Both theoretic analysis and simulation results
show only few buses with heavy loads have big impacts
for the system voltage stability. Thus, an effective strategy
could be proposed to reduce the amount of PMUs and
determine the optimal locations of PMUs, for voltage
stability assessment and monitoring.
This work was supported by Harbin Scientific Research Innovation
Talents Foundation (2008RFQXG054) and NSFC (50807009).
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2012 IEEE 7th International Power Electronics and Motion Control Conference - ECCE Asia
June 2-5, 2012, Harbin, China
978-1-4577-2088-8/11/$26.00 2012 IEEE
II. AN ANALYTICAL INDEX FOR VOLTAGE STABILITY
ASSESSMENT AND MONITORING
Figure 1 shows a general power system, which consists
of n loads, m generators and a lot of tie-buses inside the
network. The injection currents into the three types of
buses can be expressed as:
(
(
(

(
(
(

=
(
(
(

G
T
L
GG GT GL
TG TT TL
LG LT LL
G
L
V
V
V
Y Y Y
Y Y Y
Y Y Y
I
I
0
(1)
where Y is known as the system admittance matrix, V and I
stand for the voltage and current vectors, and the subscript
L, T, and G represent load bus, tie bus, and generator bus,
respectively.

V
L1
V
L2
V
Ln
Load 1
Load n
I
L1
I L2
I
Ln
Load 2




Power Grid
(network)

E G
2

G
m

G
1


Figure 1. A general electric power network

According to (1), we can derive the load bus voltages:
L LL eq L
I Z E V = (2)
where
1 1
) (

=
TL TT LT LL LL
Y Y Y Y Z (3)
G LG TG TT LT LL eq
V Y Y Y Y Z E ) (
1
=

(4)
Let Z
LLij
represent the i-j element of Z
LL
, and then (2)
can be rewritten as:
) , , 2 1 (
, ,
n , i I Z E V
Li i eq i eq Li
= = (5)
where E
eq,i
is the i
th
element of E
eq
, V
Li
and I
Li
are the
voltage and current of load i, respectively, and
) , , 2 1 (
1
,
n , i
I
I
Z Z
Li
Lj
n
j
LLij i eq
= =

=
(6)
Consequently, we could get a decoupled equivalent
circuit model seen from individual load buses, shown in
Fig. 2 [14].

E
eq,n
Load 1
E
eq,1
E
eq,2
VL1 IL1
~
~
~
V
L2
I
L2
V
Ln
I
Ln
Load 2
Load n
Z
eq,1
Zeq,2
Z
eq,n

Figure 2. A decoupled equivalent circuit

Strictly speaking, Z
eq,i
is not the actual Thevenin
equivalent impedance seen from load i. However, we
could give a proof that it satisfies a generalized impedance
matching condition [14]. Based on this, we present the
following impedance ratio index to represent the voltage
stability of the bus connected to load i:

Li
n
j
Li Lj LLij
i
Z
I I Z
r

=
=
1
*
) ,..., 2 , 1 ( n i = (7)
where Z
Li
is the impedance of load i.
In order to verify the performance of the proposed index,
case studies have been conducted on the IEEE 30 bus
system. Figure 3 shows the impedance ratio indexes of all
load buses for different loading level (scaling factor). In
the studies, all loads are modeled as the constant-power
type and are increased by a common scaling factor from
the current point to the system collapse point. The voltages
and currents for all buses are obtained using MATPOWER
which is a MATLAB based Power System Simulation
Package [15].

Figure 3. The impedance ratio indexes of load buses of the IEEE 30 bus
system


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It can be seen that the impedance ratio index for all
load buses decrease when the scaling factor increases.
When the operating point is close to the point of collapse,
at least one load buss impedance ratio index r
i
is close to
unity.
III. PMU PLACEMENT FOR VOLTAGE STABILITY
ASSESSMENT AND MONITORING
In theory, as shown in (7), all load currents are needed to
calculate r
i
. However, it is not economically reasonable to
spead PMUs all over the load buses. So, it is significant to
investigate how to reduce the number of PMUs for voltage
stability assessment and monitoring. When only a limited
number of PMUs are used, it is essential to locate them at
most effective positions in the network.
Below, an analytical index and method is to be proposed
to optimize the amount and locations of PMUs for voltage
stability assessment and monitoring.
A. An analytical approach for optimal PMU placement
Clearly, (7) can be further expressed as:
*
,
1 1
1
n n
LLij Lj
i i j
j j Li Li
Z I
r r
V V



) ,..., 2 , 1 ( n i = (8)
where
*
, i j LLij Lj
r Z I (9)
Obviously, r
i,j
in (9) could be considered as an index to
indicate the contribution of load j to r
i
. Thus, r
i,j
could be
used to identify the optimal locations for PMU placement
for voltage stability assessment.
It can be observed from (8) that, only the buses with
heavy loads and big Z
LLij
have relatively significant impacts
on r
i
. Therefore, though the currents of all load buses are
theoretically needed to calculate r
i
, only the currents of few
load buses are enough for the implementation in practical
applications, which make it easy to implement the proposed
method.
B. Case studies
Figure 4 shows the index r
i
for all load buses for a
certain loading level for the IEEE 30 bus system. It can be
observed that the bus connected to load 3 is closest to the
system voltage stability boundary, because r
3
is the largest
one. Therefore, the bus which is connected to load 3 is one
of the most desirable PMU locations for voltage stability
monitoring.

Figure 4. The impedance ratio indexes of load buses of the IEEE 30 bus
system for a certain loading level

Figure 5 shows the contribution index of every load bus
to r
3
. It can be easily observed that only few load buses
have relatively significant contributions to r
3
. This
observation is significantly important, and could lead to a
practical strategy for PMU placement for voltage stability
assessment and monitoring. In this case, it is adequate
enough to place PMUs only in the buses connected to
loads 3 to 5, for the system voltage stability assessment
and monitoring.

Figure 5. Contributions of every load bus to r3

In practical power systems, various loading levels and
generating patterns probably occur. Therefore, in order to
determine the optimal number and locations of PMUs, it is
necessary to simulate a variety of stressed system scenario
for voltage stability assessment. Generally, in a practical
power system, there are only few voltage weak buses, even
for various system conditions. Therefore, it is not difficult
to determine the optimal number and locations of PMUs,
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using the proposed index and method, for voltage stability
assessment and monitoring.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
This paper proposes an analytical index and approach to
determine the optimal number and locations of PMUs for
online voltage stability assessment and monitoring. Case
studies have been conducted on the IEEE 30 bus system,
and the results show that only few buses with heavy loads
have big impacts on the system voltage stability, which
verifies the effectiveness of the proposed PMU placement
index and method.
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