WAMS-Based Coherency Detection for Situational Awareness in Power Systems With Renewables

With the ever-increasing penetration level of renewable generation sources, a modern power system is facing more inevitable uncertainties that could lead to weakly damped oscillations. Detecting coherency among synchronous generators is one of the key steps of situational awareness for a given power system with a very high level of renewable penetration. In this paper, a wide-area measurement system (WAMS) based coherency detection algorithm employing the kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and clustering analysis based on affinity propagation (AP) is proposed for a power system with extensive penetration of renewable generation sources. First, several trajectory similarity indexes are presented for determining the similarity between the trajectories of any two generators in the center of inertia coordinate. Second, a KPCA-based method is presented to integrate the trajectory similarity indexes for addressing the correlations among multiple indexes. Next, the AP-based clustering analysis method is utilized to detect the coherency among synchronous generators without the need of prespecifying the number of clusters. Finally, Southern China power system and a part of northern China power system with Zhangbei wind farms included, both with very high levels of renewable generation penetration, are utilized to demonstrate the proposed WAMS-based coherency detection methodology, and the application to actual Guangdong power system in south China to verify the applicability and practicality.