Available Transfer Capability (ATC) under Deregulated Environment

Abstract

The structure of the power industry is moving towards deregulated environment from the regulatory environment (monopoly). With deregulation taking place in the power industry it introduces a more competitive environment in terms of free choice of suppliers for the trading of electricity. Monopolies of an industry will lead to a poor performance from the sector as there are no competitions for the sole company to strive for improvement. It will result in poor market structure for the particular industry. Under deregulated environment, there are many technical issues need to be addressed. In this paper, one issue namely ‘available transfer capability (ATC)’ is considered. ATC can be well-defined as a measure of the power transfer capability remaining in the physical transmission network for additional commercial goings-on over and above the already committed usages. It can be influenced by a number of aspects such as system generation dispatch, system load level, load distribution in the network, power transfer between areas and the limit enforced on the transmission network due to thermal, voltage and stability considerations. The computation of ATC is very important to the transmission system security and market forecasting. While the power marketers are focusing on fully utilizing the transmission system, engineers are disquiet with the transmission system security as any power transfers over the limit might outcome in system instability. One of the aims of this thesis is to increase the power transfer capability between two parts of the system. ATC can be calculated using a simple and non-iterative method for a transmission system using a set of distribution factors. Sets of the power transfer distribution factors (PTDF) have been obtained using the sensitivity-based approach. This approach is well suited for both normal and contingency operation. In this paper, only line flow limits have been taken to calculate ATC.

Keywords: Available transfer capability (ATC), deregulation, monopoly, power transfer distribution factors (PTDF’S)

Cite this Article

E. Fantin Irudaya Raj. Available Transfer Capability (ATC) under Deregulated Environment. Journal of Power Electronics and Power Systems. 2016; 6(2): 85–88p.