POWER TRANSFER BOTTLENECKS DETERMINATION FOR THE EASTERN GRID OF BANGLADESH POWER SYSTEM

Abstract

The emerging trend of deregulating power industries requires the operator to keep the transmission network congestion free when the generation companies compete to sell electricity to the distributors or wholesale purchasers. This requires the determination of various power transfer bottlenecks in the existing network. For this purpose the real-time predetermination of an index termed “Available Transfer Capability (ATC)” is required. Transfer capability of a power system also indicates how much inter area power transfer can be increased without system security violations. In case of large power systems such as that of Bangladesh, the vital information required for the planning and operation of the system are provided from the transfer capability calculations. These details provide system bottlenecks to the planners and the limits of the power transfers to the system operators. Thus power transfer bottlenecks determination of Bangladesh Power System effectively means the calculation of ATC of the system. In order to provide an effective and in depth knowledge of ATC determination, various calculation methods have been discussed in the thesis, and two of them, namely Repeated Power Flow Method and Path Dependent Network Flow model have been applied for the actual calculation procedure. As working with a large number of data makes the analysis process difficult and cumbersome, so only data from the Eastern Grid of Bangladesh Power System have been used in this research. The fact that the Eastern Grid contains about 76% of the total generation capacity, has also worked as incentive. Additionally, comparison of the results obtained from both calculation techniques are provided, which gives an in depth idea about the system capabilities and transmission bottlenecks along with directions and suggestions for improvements and future works needed in this area.