Congestion management in bilateral based power market by FACTS devices and load curtailments

The restructuring of the electric power industry has involved paradigm shifts in the real time control activities of the power grids. Managing dispatch is one of the important control activities in a power system. With the trend of an increasing number of bilateral contracts being signed for electricity market trades, the possibility of insufficient resources leading to network congestion may be unavoidable. In this scenario, congestion management becomes an important issue. Real-time transmission congestion can be defined as the operating condition in which there is not enough transmission capability to implement all the traded transactions. It may be alleviated by incorporating line capacity constraints in the dispatch and scheduling process. This may involve re-dispatch of generation or load curtailment. Other possible means for relieving congestion are operation of FACTS devices (TCSC), these two ways are compared in this paper.