Transient Stability Assessment of Renewable Dominated Power Systems by the Method of Hyperplanes

With continuous increase of penetration of renewable energies and power electronic equipment, power grid stability incidents are emerging frequently worldwide. In this article, the transient stability assessment of renewable dominated power systems with multiple PLL-based voltage source converters (VSCs) is studied by calculating critical clearing time (CCT). A tangent hyperplane method is developed, which approximates the boundary of basin of attraction near unstable equilibrium point by linear system theory. The detailed algorithm is presented, accompanying with four typical case studies, including a single machine infinite system, two parallel VSCs, modified IEEE 9-bus, and modified 39-bus systems. Broad EMT simulations are performed to verify the accuracy and computational effectiveness of the algorithm. In all these tests, we find that the hyperplane method can give accurate estimations of CCTs. Hence it is expected to be an efficient method. In addition, we find that generally the CCT in renewable dominated power systems is around tens of milliseconds, which is much shorter than that in traditional power systems around hundreds of milliseconds. Therefore, it might be imperative to adopt faster controls and protections for renewable dominated power systems.