Situational Awareness for Reactive Power Management in Large-Scale Electric Grids

Situational awareness is imperative for reactive power management, particularly for interpreting the results of studies evaluating the impact of geomagnetic disturbances or high levels of renewable generation on the grid. This paper introduces a visualization technique, VAR Ready Reserves (VRRs), to provide a novel and useful tool to enhance the situational awareness of users performing and interpreting power system studies. This visualization technique can be adapted to demonstrate the dispatch, injection, and absorption capability of reactive power devices (such as generators, shunts, SVCs) in either a chart view (VRR charts) or with an integrated system view (VRR GDVs) to provide users with the awareness of reactive power capability and dispatch over the duration of a simulation or spatially. This paper reviews industry practices for reactive power management, summarizes existing visualization strategies, and demonstrates the newly-developed VRRs on a 2000-bus case study.