Products

On-line Dynamic Security Assessment (TEPCO-BCU)

TEPCO-BCU, a result of seven years joint product development between the Tokyo Electric Power Company, Tokyo, Japan and Bigwood Systems, is jointly owned, supported, and marketed by TEPCO and Bigwood. On-line DSA (Dynamic Security Assessment) offers several significant engineering and financial benefits. First, power systems may be managed with operating margins reduced by a factor of 10 or more if on-line DSA, which is based on actual system configuration and operating conditions, is performed instead of assumed worst-case conditions, as is done in off-line DSA. A second benefit of on-line DSA is that it enables accurate determination of available transfer capability constrained by dynamic security to allow the operator to load the system to maximum throughput. The overall savings gained by increased MW transaction capability can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.

TEPCO-BCU, for reliable and effective on-line dynamic security assessments and energy margin calculations of practical power systems, include s the following :

• Fast stability assessments of a list of credible contingencies
• Computation of energy margin for transient stability assessment of each contingency
• BCU-based fast computation of critical clearing time of each contingency
• Fast identification of severe contingencies with zero or negative energy margins
• Contingency screening and ranking for transient stability in terms of energy margin or critical clearing time
• Detailed time-domain simulation of selected contingencies.

TEPCO-BCU’s unique and distinguished features enable the development of many applications that are significant from both financial and security viewpoints Applications related to power system operation, planning and maintenance include:

(1) On-line DSA and operating margins reduction
(2) Preventive Control against transient instability
(3) Special Protection Systems (SPS) design
(4) Manpower savings in stability studies
(5) Reliability-based maintenance scheduling
(6) Transient-Stability-Constrained Available Transfer Capability analysis and enhancement
(7) Security-based cost-effective protection system design
(8) True Adaptive Relay development
(9) Dynamic Congestion Management
(10) Power System Security value quantification

Field Proven TEPCO-BCU

TEPCO-BCU is installed and in operating at EPDC, Tokyo, Japan and Tokyo Electric Co., Inc., Japan. This technology is also integrated with the EMS of two large electric utilities in Central and North America to perform on-line dynamic security assessment as a tightly coupled component of the Energy Management Control Center.

TEPCO-BCU Performance

TEPCO-BCU was recently benchmark on the real-time model for a major RTO with following specification:

Using a typical PC machine configuration with a 3.6 GHZ Xeon CPU (single processor mode), the average time to process each contingency was 2 seconds. This processing time included the Transient Stability Analysis, Energy Margin Calculation and Critical Clearing Time Calculation.

TEPCO-BCU Strengths