Analyzing transient instability phenomena beyond the classical stability boundary

We consider power systems for which the amount of power produced by their individual power plants is small with respect to the total generation of the system, and analyze how the transient instability mechanisms of these systems change qualitatively when their size or the dispersion of their generators increases. Simulation results show that loss of synchronism will propagate more slowly and even stop propagating. Given the evolution of power systems towards more dispersed generation and geographically larger interconnections, we conclude that research in transient stability should focus more on the propagation of the loss of synchronism over longer time periods, so as to assess what happens to the overall system subsequently to the loss of synchronism of the first generators. We also argue that such studies might be very useful in order to provide guidelines for setting up power system control schemes to contain the propagation of instabilities, and we discuss some ideas for designing islanding based emergency control schemes for this.