Power System Contingency Analysis: A Study of Nigerias 330KV

Transmission Grid
Nnonyelu, Chibuzo Joseph
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Nigeria, Nsukka
[email protected]

Prof. Theophilus C. Madueme

Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Nigeria, Nsukka
Abstracts

As new sources of power are added to the Nigerias power system, an over-riding factor in the
operation of the power system is the desire to maintain security and expectable reliability level
in all sectors generation, transmission, and distribution. System security can be assessed using
contingency analysis. In this paper, contingency analysis and reliability evaluation of Nigeria
power system will be performed using the load flow method. The result of this analysis will be
used to determine the security level of the Nigeria power system and suggestions will also be
made on the level of protection to be applied on the Nigeria power system with aim of
improving system security.
Keywords: Contingency Analysis, Contingency, Power System Security, Overload Index
1. INTRODUCTION
Power system protection is an important factor of consideration in all sectors of a power system
during both planning and operation stages. This is because any loss of component leads to
transient instability of the system and can be checked immediately by the help of protective
devices put in place. As we propose and source new sources of power in order to meet up the
Nigeria energy demand, it is important to access the security level of the existing grid in order
to devise a more defensive approach of operation.
Currently, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCM), projected to have the capacity to
deliver about 12,500 MW in 2013, has the capacity of delivering 4800 MW of electricity.
Nigeria has a generating capacity of 5,228 MW but with peak production of 4500 MW against
a peak demand forecast of 10,200MW. This shows that if the generation sector is to run at full
production, the transmission grid will not have the capacity to handle the produced power
reliably [7]. This goes a long way to tell that the 330 KV transmission system is not running
effectively as expected. Therefore to maintain and ensure a secure operation of this delicate
system, the need for contingency analysis cannot be over emphasized.
Contingencies are defined as potentially harmful disturbances that occur during the steady state
operation of a power system [1] Contingencies can lead to some abnormalities such as over
voltage at some buses, over loading on the lines, which if are unchecked, can lead to total
system collapse.
Power system engineers use contingency analysis to predict the effect of any component
failure. Periodically, maintenance operation are carried out on generating units or transmission
lines. During this, a unit is taken offline for servicing. The effect of this forced outage on other
parts of the system can be observed using contingency analysis.
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As demand for power increases, more generating units are installed in Nigeria with no
corresponding increase in transmission capacity. This makes the transmission lines run at their
maximum power capacity which is very dangerous as there is too much power in the system at
any moment. This power will be shifted to any available portion of the transmission system in
case of any contingency thereby overloading the available portion. This effect can be analysed
by the calculation of Line Outage Distribution Factor (LODF). Also, the overloading index of
the remaining lines will can be obtained equally.
2. POWER SYSTEM SECURITY
One of the most important factors in the operation of any power system is the desire to maintain
system availability and reliability. This ensures a secure operation of the system and improved
economic operation. Power system security is the ability of the system to withstand one or
more component outages with the minimal disruption of service or its quality. System security
involves practices designed to keep the system operating in emergency state when components
fail and to restore it to its preventive state. For instance, a generating unit may break down or
have to be taken off-line for maintenance purposes. This leads to frequency and voltage
instability as the available generating unit experiences more loads than usual, hence frequency
drops and bus voltages lowers. If this is not foreseen and defensively prevented by use of
protective devices such as relays for load shading, it can lead to the collapse of the concerned
system. Therefore the control objective in the emergency state is to relieve system stress by
appropriate actions while economic consideration becomes of secondary.
2.1 CONTINGENCY ANALYSIS
Contingency analysis is the study of the outage of elements such as transmission lines,
transformers and generators, and investigation of the resulting effects on line power flows and
bus voltages of the remaining system. It represents an important tool to study the effect of
elements outages in power system security during operation and planning. Contingencies
referring to disturbances such as transmission element outages or generator outages may cause
sudden and large changes in both the configuration and the state of the system. Contingencies
may result in severe violations of the operating constraints. Consequently, planning for
contingencies forms an important aspect of secure operation [2].
There are various methods of contingency analysis which include the following:
a. AC Load flow method
b. DC Load flow method
c. Z-Matrix method
d. Performance Index method
Of all the above listed methods, methods based on AC power flow calculations are considered
to be deterministic methods which are accurate compared to DC power flow methods. In
deterministic methods line outages are simulated by actual removal of lines instead of
modelling. AC power flow methods are accurate but they are computationally expensive and
excessively demanding of computational time. Because contingency analysis is the only tool
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for detecting possible overloading conditions requiring the study by the power system planner
computational speed and ease of detection are paramount considerations. [1]
Results of contingency analysis are usually ranked based on some indices calculated during the
analysis. The choice of performance index to calculate depends on the engineer. In a
deregulated power system, a discernibly purely profit driven, economic operation is of utmost
importance hence Available Transfer Capability (ATC) is normally calculated to ascertain the
available transfer capability of the system in case of any contingency. Other Indices include
Voltage Stability Index (VSI), Active Power Loading Performance Index (APLPI), Line
Outage Distribution Factor (LODF), Line loadability, etc.
Generally, once the current working state of a system is known, contingency analysis can be
broken down into the following steps:
a. Contingency definition
b. Contingency selection
c. Contingency evaluation
Contingency definition involves preparing a list of probable contingencies. This typically
includes line outages and generator outages.
Contingency selection process consists of selecting the set of most probable contingencies;
they need to be evaluated in terms of potential risk to the system. Usually, fast power flow
solution techniques such as DC power flow are used to quickly evaluate the risks associated
with each contingency. But in this work, the Newton-Raphson load flow method will be used
to ensure higher accuracy.
Finally, the selected contingencies are ranked in order of their security, till no violation of
operating limits is observed.
The algorithm for a typical contingency analysis is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Algorithm of a typical contingency analysis

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2.2 LINE LOADABILITY

Line Loadability can be defined as Transmission-line voltages decrease when heavily loaded
and increase when lightly loaded. When voltages on EHV lines are maintained within 5% of
rated voltage, corresponding to about 10% voltage regulation, unusual operating problems are
not encountered. Ten percent voltage regulation for lower voltage lines including transformervoltage drops is also considered good operating practice.
In addition to voltage regulation, line loadability is an important issue. Three major line-loading
limits are:
a. the thermal limit,
b. the voltage-drop limit, and
c. the steady-state stability limit.
The maximum temperature of a conductor determines its thermal limit. Conductor temperature
affects the conductor sag between towers and the loss of conductor tensile strength due to
annealing. If the temperature is too high, prescribed conductor-to-ground clearances may not
be met, or the elastic limit of the conductor may be exceeded such that it cannot shrink to its
original length when cooled.
Conductor temperature depends on the current magnitude and its time duration, as well as on
ambient temperature, wind velocity, and conductor surface conditions.
The loadability of short transmission lines (less than 80 km in length) is usually determined by
the conductor thermal limit or by ratings of line terminal equipment such as circuit breakers.
For longer line lengths (up to 300 km), line loadability is often determined by the voltage-drop
limit. Although more severe voltage drops may be tolerated in some cases, a heavily loaded
line with VR/VS 0.95 is usually considered safe operating practice. For line lengths over 300
km, steady-state stability becomes a limiting factor [4].
3. METHODOLOGY
In this paper, the AC load flow method of contingency analysis was adopted. The NewtonRaphson load flow algorithm, an algorithm under the AC load flow method, was used to solve
the power flow problems during the analysis using MATLAB. This is because the NRLF
method has more accuracy than other AC Load flow methods and converges faster. NewtonRaphons Load flow method is discussed more in [3, 4].
3.1 Calculating System Line Overload Index (SLOI)
To obtain the overall system overload index, a new performance index was proposed and
calculated based on the Line Loadability discussed in Section 2.2. As stated, for safe operation,
the ratio of the receiving end voltage and the sending end voltage must be greater than 0.95.
This newly proposed index relies on this to calculate the system line overload index. It helps
tell the system designer at a glance, the lines that should be given utmost attention in terms of
protection. SLOI is computed by equation (1):

= 1 [min ( )]

(1)

where
VR, VS are the receiving end and sending end voltages respectively, and
k the number of lines whose VR/VS < 0.95
The Nigerian transmission grid is shown in Figure 2 with the single line diagram shown in
Figure 3.

Figure 2: the Nigerian power system. Blue lines indicate the 330-KV lines
(Source: Nigeria System Operator)

Figure 3: one-line diagram of the Nigeria 330-KV transmission grid

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The network parameters generator data, load data, and line & transformer data, of the Nigeria
power system as used in this work were collated from [8, 9, 10] and are shown in tables 1, 2,
and 3 respectively.
Table 1: Generator data
Bus
no
1

Bus name
Kanji GS

PG
(MW)
756

Voltage (pu)
1

Shiroro

413

Jebba GS

339

70

20

Sapele

21

Egbin

967

22

Afam

316

25

Delta GS

498

26

AES

235

Table 2: Load data

Bus
no

Bus name

2
3
4
5
6
9
10
11
12

Brini-Kebbi
Kano
Jos
Gombe
Kaduna
Jebba TS
Katampe
Oshogbo
Ajaokuta

Active
Power
(MW)
89
226
114
130
260
7.44
236
194
72

Reactive
Power
(MVAr)
55
140
90
80
161
3.79
146
120
45

Bus
no

Bus name

13
14
15
16
17
18
19
23
24

New Haven
Aiyede
Ikeja-West
Benin
Onitsha
Alaoji
Akangba
Aja
Aladja

Active
Power
(MW)
182
210
484
136
146
248
389
200
47.997

Reactive
Power
(MVAr)
112
130
300
84
77
153
241
124
24.589

Table 3: Lines and Transformer data

from
bus
2
1
8
9
11
11
14
15
15
21
15
16
20

to
bus
1
9
9
11
15
14
15
19
21
23
16
20
24

r (pu)
0.02676
0.00699
0.00069
0.01355
0.02167
0.00993
0.01183
0.00147
0.00535
0.00138
0.02417
0.00432
0.00544

x (pu)
0.06576
0.01718
0.0017
0.0333
0.05324
0.02439
0.02906
0.00361
0.01315
0.00339
0.05939
0.01061
0.01336

y/2
(pu)
1.178
0.308
0.033
0.597
0.521
0.437
0.521
0.065
0.257
0.257
1.162
0.208
0.239

from
bus
25
25
12
11
7
7
6
3
4
4
16
13
17
18

to
bus
24
16
16
16
9
10
7
6
6
5
17
17
18
22

r (pu)
0.00276
0.00924
0.0145
0.02167
0.02106
0.01243
0.00829
0.01985
0.01692
0.02279
0.01183
0.00829
0.01191
0.00216

x (pu)
0.00679
0.0227
0.03564
0.05324
0.05176
0.03055
0.02036
0.04879
0.04158
0.056
0.02906
0.02036
0.02927
0.0053

y/2
(pu)
0.171
0.239
0.745
0.954
0.927
0.564
0.364
0.874
0.748
1.01
0.521
0.0355
0.524
0.104

3.1 Simulation of Line Outage

Simulation of transmission line outage is carried out by the formulation of the corresponding
admittance matrix [5]. For instance, after outage of a line connecting bus a and b, the
components of the Y bus that will be affected are Yaa, Ybb, Yab, and Yba. For a -modelled
transmission line, the admittance values after this outage is obtained by subtracting the
admittance of the line a-b and the shunt susceptance jbab/2 and jbba/2 from Yaa and Ybb.
Line outages was simulated by simply removing the line information from the line data matrix.
This is similar to the line not existing initially as the information no longer exists.
3.2 Simulation of Generator Outage
This simulates mainly outage of one unit (or more) in a power station. Let the total generation
for the station at bus m be Pgm, and assume that there exist identical (g) units, then [6]:

= (

(2)

where
Pgm: Active power generated at bus m after the outage
Pgm: Active power generated at bus m before the outage
n: Number of outage generation units in the station
Pgm/g: Active power generated at bus m per generator unit
In this work, generator outages were not simulated as only the effect of line outages were
desired.
4. Results and Discussion
The results of the analysis (the SLOI) is shown in Table 4 ordered by the SLOI from the most
critical to the least critical.
Table 4: SLOI values for line outages
from bus
11
11
16
20
25
14
15
25
11

to bus
14
15
20
24
16
15
16
24
16

SLOI
0.62861
0.57216
0.57216
0.57216
0.57216
0.50712
0.50712
0.50712
0.50712
0.39802

16

20

0.37794

11

16

0.35225

from bus
1
8
12
7
9
11
20
15
14
25
11
15

25

16

0.35088

15

19

SLOI
0.345921
0.310785
0.26828
0.25531
0.251848
0.22509
0.21975
0.199932
0.182697
0.17881
0.174183
0.14697
0.131305

21

23

0.130708

to bus
9
9
16
9
11
14
24
21
15
24
15
16

The result as shown in Table 4 contains the SLOI values of the different lines for line outages.
It has been organised in the order in descending order.
This shows that the outage of line 11 to 14 (Oshogbo to Aiyede) will have the most critical
effect on the system followed by 11 15, 16 20, 20 24, 25 16. These lines have been
shown to pose serious danger on the system stability if they fail, and therefore should be
secured defensively to avoid the level of system instability caused by the outage of any of the
lines.
5. Conclusion
From this study, it is has been shown with values, the importance of operating the transmission
system defensively to avoid system collapse due to overloading. Also, the writer suggests that
the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) should adopts the (Flexible AC Transmission),
FACT devices as they can improve the lines active power capability in any contingency event
as have faster switching than the traditional compensation devices. Also additional lines should
be used to connect Oshogbo to Aiyede through different routes to create more links for power
to be transmitted through to Lagos area in order to reduce the SLOI value of Oshogbo to Aiyede
line.

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