STEADY STATE VOLTAGE STABILITY ENHANCEMENT USING STATIC SYNCHRONOUS SERIES COMPENSATOR (SSSC); A CASE STUDY OF NIGERIAN 330KV GRID SYSTEM

Steady state and transient problems in a power system have undesirable consequences on the system. It can limit the amount of power that can be transmitted in the system and consequently leads to voltage instability and at times it may also result into total voltage collapse. This work addressed the problems of voltage instability. Presented in this paper is the application of Static Synchronous Series Compensator to control voltage magnitude at low voltage buses in the Nigerian 330kV grid. Power flow equations involve solution to nonlinear algebraic equations using reliable mathematical algorithms. In this work, the Newton Raphson iterative algorithm was adopted due to its ability to converge after a few iterations. Simulation of power flow solutions without and with SSSC was done using MATLAB based programme. Where voltage drops were noticed, SSSC was incorporated and the new voltage magnitudes were computed. For instance, voltages at buses 9(Ayede), 13(New-Haven), 14(Onitsha), 16(Gombe), 19(Jos) and 22(Kano). The successful incorporation of the SSSC enhanced the voltage magnitudes at those buses and subsequently improved the reactive power supply to the Nigerian 330kV grid. The active power and reactive power loss also reduced by 2.18 % and 5.93% respectively when SSSC was incorporated. The results from the analysis showed a considerable improvement in the voltage magnitude with the incorporation of SSSC and consequently a significant reduction in the syste