Techno-economic impacts of automatic undervoltage load shedding under emergency

Different schemes for voltage control under emergency are adopted in different jurisdictions around the world. While some features, such as Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR), are common in all countries, for what concerns undervoltage load shedding (UVLS), to contrast voltage instability or collapse, different schemes are adopted. Most US transmission system operators (TSOs) adopt automatic UVLS schemes, with different capabilities and settings while TSOs in EU usually do not implement automatic UVLS but leave the decisions to the control room operators. The two options may lead to different impacts in terms of trajectory and final status of the transmission grid under emergency, with different unserved energy. In this paper we analyze the impacts from a technical and economic perspective, modeling the grid behavior with different UVLS schemes (none, manual and automatic). The comparison between the different schemes is done resorting to the Incident Response System (IRS), a software tool developed by the authors in the EU-FP7 SESAME project. An illustrative example to a realistic test case is presented and discussed. This paper shows that automatic UVLS is superior to Manual UVLS, from both technical and economic point of view, due to the fast evolution of voltage collapse phenomena and insufficient time for system operators' manual reaction. The benefits of the scheme involving the automatic UVLS can be then compared with the investment costs of equipping the network with those devices.