An Integrated Program to Improve the Quality of Frequency Regulation in Colombia and the Andean Interconnected System

This article will describe the integrated program to improve the quality of Frequency Regulation which was implemented in Colombia by XM, the Colombian Power System Operator. In this program, primary and secondary frequency control were first studied independently in order to determine the real generation unit control capability of each one. Then, several systematic tests were made to establish the regulation performance of the Power System and to obtain the final coordination of the two frequency control schemes. The load frequency control (LFC) was extended to consider islanding system operation due to either a terrorist attack against the network infrastructure or to any other isolated system condition. Additionally, a novel component-based application was developed using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Excel. This software solution was designed to collect and integrate all data sources, such as ancillary services parameters, economic dispatch, SCADA/EMS, stand alone register, primary and secondary tuning parameters in one unique analysis and monitoring environment. This paper also presents the results of the application of this approach in the Colombian, Ecuadorian and Venezuelan Interconnected Power system and its positive impact on making feasible the Andean Interconnected system.