An investigation on the reactive power support service needs of power producers

Reactive power is an important system support service in the current power market. Power producers or generators have the opportunity to offer this service to make a profit. Given the fact that a generator needs reactive power to transmit its own active power, however, it is possible that certain generators cannot support a system even if they are generating reactive power. This paper investigates such a phenomenon and proposes a method to determine the minimum amount of reactive power (Q_min) required for a given generator. If a generator cannot supply this minimum amount, it actually draws reactive power support from the system to facilitate its own active power selling activity. Compensation to a generator´s reactive power output should be made only to the amount that is above the Q_min amount. The proposed ideas are illustrated with simple systems in this paper and tested on a real-life power system. The test results verified the validity of the proposed concept and method.