Bottleneck Engineering and Optimal Technical and Non-Technical Approaches in Power Grid’s Congestion Management: A Real Case Study

The congestion phenomenon is one of the challenging problems during peak hours of power grids. With no management or scientific approach, it can cause severe and irreparable damage to the grid equipment and substantial financial losses to the network owners. Congestion management (CM) has been introduced as a critical solution to eliminate power transmission obstacles and prevent lines and transformers overloading and several grid damages. Some studies have been conducted with the aim of congestion management in recent years, which generally have a technical or non-technical approach using planning and optimizing methods on predetermined data. In this research, a 10-year analysis of monthly peak load snapshots of an actual power system using a powerful analyzer software, PowerFactory version 2022 (DIgSILENT), and recorded loads by the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system under different scenarios is investigated. This real case study includes the impacts of distributed generations (renewable or non-renewable), large-scale centralized power plant (PP) and the proposed optimal allocation of flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices such as static VAR compensator (SVC), phase shifting transformer (PST) to the power grid using grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. Also, expansion stages in the power lines, stations and increasing the capacity at the bottleneck points are simulated. The effectiveness of technical and non-technical proposed approaches for congestion management is confirmed in the result section

Congestion phenomenon, Blackouts, Congestion Management, Bottleneck, FACTS Devices, SCADA