Impact of STATCOMs in Dominion Energy's System Restoration Plan

The goal of a system restoration plan is to re-energize the entirety of the power system as quickly as possible. Identifying a cranking path at the 500 kV level can help to decrease the downtime after a blackout and to rapidly restore critical loads. Along the identified cranking path, energizing high voltage transmission lines requires capacitive/inductive reactive power compensation. Restoring loads and/or switching capacitors/inductors provide a certain amount of reactive power. However, manually switching these shunt compensation devices could cause transient/sustained over-voltages or dynamic instability. Instead of using fixed switched reactive power compensation, the use of Static Synchronous Compensators (STATCOMs) as a potential blackstart resource is considered to provide dynamic reactive power support. In this paper, the impact of a STATCOM on the restoration process is investigated. The study is conducted based on an identified cranking path at the 500 kV level in Dominion's system network. Simulation results in PSS/E and PSCAD show that implementing a STATCOM brings significant benefits to the system restoration process.