Electric Power System Analysis and Design of an Expanding Steel Cogeneration Plant

This paper presents the electric power system analysis and design of an expanding steel cogeneration plant. The power system configuration and the equipment parameters of the cogeneration plant are well designed according to the power flow, short circuit, voltage fluctuation, harmonic flow and transient stability analyses. According to the power flow analysis, the site and capacity of shunt capacitor banks as well as the tap position of transformers are determined to maintain all the buses voltage at acceptable range and to keep the power factor above 0.95. Also, to comply with the restriction of circuit breaker capacity, the high impedance transformers are designed even if they consumed more reactive power from the system. In addition, the voltage fluctuation resulted from the dramatic reactive power variation of hot strip rolling mill can be greatly reduced if proper static var compensator (SVC) is installed. The significant voltage sag due to the starting of induction motor can be effectively improved by applying wye-delta transformer starter. Furthermore, the total voltage harmonic distortion (THD_V) and the total current demand distortion (TDD_I) are both acceptable if the proper filters are installed. It is also found that the cogeneration system can keep stable operation in isochronous mode by applying the governor control action and the load shedding scheme after tie line tripping. It is concluded that the power system analyses is important for the steel plant with cogeneration unit to identify hidden problems and remedy strategy to ensure the system power quality and operation performance.