Complete power management system for an industrial refinery

Islanded power systems for critical facilities require a robust, secure, and reliable power management system that can respond to system disturbances and avoid blackouts to ensure process survivability. A facility in Saudi Arabia with four gas-oil separation plants and one natural gas liquids recovery facility operates with a total installed generation capacity of approximately two gigawatts and no utility interconnections. This paper discusses power management system components, such as automatic generation control (power and frequency), volt/VAR control systems (reactive power and voltage), intertie power factor control, high-speed generation shedding and runback, and high-speed load shedding, along with an overview of the overall system architecture and the state-of-the-art dual-ring time-division multiplexing synchronous optical network communications networks at this facility. High-speed generation-shedding and load-shedding systems are designed with over-frequency- and underfrequency-based secondary backup protection schemes to provide additional system reliability. This paper also introduces a transient-level computer model of the facility power system, which is used for functional testing of the power management system components.