TVA installs Bigwood Systems' QRZoner tool for Reactive Power Reserve Management

Category: Reactive Power

Chattanooga, TN -- Bigwood Systems, Inc. (BSI) implemented the QRZoner, BSI’s tool for automatically defining reactive reserve regional zoning for an electric service network. TVA has a long-standing relationship with BSI for the application and development of innovative solutions for the power grid. QRZoner is the most recent product in our proud history of delivering solutions to TVA.

TVA’s acquisition of this tool was motivated by the need to periodically reset the boundaries defining each reactive reserve region. This process is highly data-intensive and thus difficult to handle manually. BSI’s Reactive Reserve Regional Zoning Tool is a unique package for analyzing EMS snapshots to identify reactive zones in the network such that buses within the same zone are electrically coherent to each other. The tool produces visualizations, reports and data sets for each proposed region. This tool promotes active, efficient monitoring and managing of the system reactive reserves on a regionalized basis at TVA and can be seamlessly loaded into BSI’s Regional Reserve VAR Management System or support other downstream applications in the control center.

TVA will use the QRZoner solutions to feed into their on-line application, BSI’s Online VAR Management System for Regional Reactive Reserve Monitoring and Control (VMS). VMS has been running continuously on-line in the TVA control center since 2013.

The BSI Online Solutions are widely used by control center operators, reliability engineers, transmission planners, and power market personnel across the country and internationally. Notable implementations are the EMS control center, operational since 2005 at PJM Interconnection (Audubon, PA), and the California Independent System Operator (Folsom, CA) control center since 2009.

The Tennessee Valley Authority provides low-cost electricity in seven southeastern states and provides flood control, navigation, and land management for the Tennessee River system. TVA's service area covers most of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small slices of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. It was the first large regional planning agency of the federal government and remains the largest.