M.Eng defence by Luis Alonso Aguirre Lopes

On Tuesday the 9th of April at 14:00 in room 147 in VR-II at the University of Iceland, Luis Alonso Aguirre Lopes will defend his M.Eng thesis, titled: "Modelling and Stability Analysis of Berlin Geothermal Power Plant in El Salvador".

His supervisor is Magni Þór Pálsson. With him in the commitee is Ólöf Helgadóttir. The external examiner is Ragnar Kristjánsson.

Everyone's welcome to attend.

The abstract:

Power system stability can be defined as the property of a power system that enables it to remain in a state of operating equilibrium under normal operating conditions and to regain an acceptable state of equilibrium after being subjected to a disturbance. There are different forms of power systems stability, but this project is focused on rotor angle stability.

Rotor angle stability is the ability of interconnected synchronous machines of a power system to remain in synchronism. For convenience in analysis and for gaining useful insight into de nature of stability problems, rotor angle stability phenomena are characterized in two categories:

• Small-signal stability is the ability of the power system to maintain synchronism under small disturbances like variation in load and generation.
• Transient stability is the ability of the power system to maintain synchronism when subjected to a severe transient disturbance like short-circuits of different types.

Energy consumption in El Salvador has had an increase of 220.6% since 1995, caused by the industrial and commercial growing in the country and the increase in the population. The peak power demand in 1995 was 591.7 MW compared with peak power demand in 2011 of 962 MW. This power consumption increase required the construction of new power plants to satisfy the demand (SIGET, 2011).

Since 2007, Berlin Geothermal power plant has had an installed capacity increase of 46 MW with the installation of two new generators. There are also new plans about the installation of two more generators around 2015, with a total capacity of 35 MW. This growing will cause changes in power flow and dynamics characteristic of the power system that have to be taken into account for the development of geothermal energy in El Salvador.

A dynamic simulation model of Berlin geothermal power plant in El Salvador is built with Matlab/Simulink with the objective of doing a dynamic study of the system taking into account the future generators. This study let us to analyse the dynamic behaviour of the power plant with small and severe disturbances in the power system.

The dynamic study take into account the most important parts of the geothermal power plant like Turbine, Governor, Generator, Excitation system, transformers and transmission lines to get a good approximation of the systems and acceptable results.