A Comparative Study of the Virtual Synchronous Compensator on the Voltage Stability Enhancement

In a higher power electronics and higher renewable penetration power system, insufficient reactive power provision from the renewable generation will lead to the voltage instability. In order to confront this issue, the reactive power compensation devices, such as capacitor bank, static var compensator and static var generator has been widely used coherent to the loading and renewable generation. However, in such the modern power system, the number of the voltage sources has been reduced. A pure reactive power injection cannot fully meet the voltage stability requirement. The virtual synchronous compensator, based on the grid-forming converter, has been proposed recently to provide a fixed voltage setup or establish a high electrical potential in the system. However, whether this new device can help improve the voltage stability and presents a better performance than the well-known reactive power compensator is not known. This paper contributes to compare the performance of the virtual synchronous compensator with other devices in various scenarios. The simulation results in Matlab/Simulink serves to verify the effectivity of the virtual synchronous compensator on the voltage stability enhancement.