A reactive power management proposal for transmission operators

The management of reactive resources, in particular the generation facilities under control of transmission operators, plays an important role in maintaining voltage stability and system reliability. The current practice of reactive management relies on heuristics and operators' judgments to procure reactive services. Consequently, it lacks a transparent market process and assurance that the procurement costs are the lowest. This paper presents a practical, market-based solution for managing reactive services by transmission operators. Three distinct features for the proposed solution are: (1) obligating generation facilities to provide reactive services in proportion to their active power output; (2) optimizing and integrating the reactive procurement with market operation for least-cost solution; and (3) taking into account the interactions of active and reactive powers for accurate calculation of the lost opportunity costs of generators. The proposed solution further simplifies the modeling and settlement aspects of reactive management. A model process of reactive power management is presented for use by independent transmission operators. A numerical example is also given to illustrate the application of the proposed solution.