Assessment of two methods to select wide-area signals for power system damping control

In this paper, two different approaches are applied to the Hydro-Quebec network in order to select the most effective signals to damp inter-area oscillations. The damping is obtained by static var compensator (SVC) and synchronous condenser (SC) modulation. The robustness analysis, the simulations, and statistical results show, unambiguously, that in the case of wide-area signals, the geometric approach is more reliable and useful than the residues approach. In fact, this study shows that the best robustness and performances are always obtained with the stabilizer configuration using the signals recommended by the geometric approach. In addition, the results confirm that wide-area control is more effective than local control for damping inter-area oscillations.