Line Congestion Management in Modern Power Systems: A Case Study of Pakistan

The surging electricity demand in Pakistan has led to frequent blackouts, prompting government initiatives to expand power plant capacities and improve the national grid. The government prioritizes integrating large-scale renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, to reduce dependence on conventional power plants. However, the intermittency of renewables leads to forecasting errors, requiring extra power reserves from conventional units, thereby escalating operational costs and CO₂ emissions. The country currently utilizes a manual mechanism for power balancing operations, overlooking critical grid constraints of the transmission line loadings. In such conditions, injecting large-scale power from renewables can lead to significant fluctuations in line power flows, risking transmission line loadings and compromising the system’s secure operation. Hence, this paper has developed an automatic generation control (AGC) model for the highly wind-integrated power system to alleviate line congestions in the network and enhance the economic operation of the system. The study utilizes the Pakistan power system as a case study to simulate the proposed model. The developed real-time power dispatch strategy for the AGC system considers the constraints of the transmission line to avoid congestion. It integrates wind energy as operating reserves to enhance the economic operation of the system. When managing line congestion, it identifies overloaded bus lines and adjusts power regulation accordingly while compensating for shortfalls by augmenting transmitted power from regional grid stations. However, it maintains a constant dispatch ratio without line overloads, aligned with generation capacities. Additionally, the strategy integrates reserve power from the wind power plant and traditional generating units to further improve economic operations. Simulations have been conducted using PowerFactory software, employing the eight-bus and five-machine models to replicate the characteristics of the Pakistan power system. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AGC design in mitigating transmission line congestion of power systems that are heavily integrated with wind energy sources while simultaneously ensuring the economic operation of generating units.