Speed Droop in Power Control Explained

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⌚Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
01:00 - Speed governor
02:10 - Isochronous generator
03:17 - Synchronous generator
04:33 - Speed droop
05:44 - NERC

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Electricity plays a significant role in our lives. From lightning rooms, maintaining comfortable temperature environments, to working domestic appliances, machinery, transportation systems and so much more, electricity has become an essential part of modern life.

Yet, unless there is a blackout and we are unable to access it, we don’t put that much thought into everything that goes behind the largest machine ever built by man… the power grid.

In this video, we are going to delve deeper into the world of electricity generation in a grid configuration by starting with a very broad view of an extremely important and complex concept: Speed Droop.

In power turbines, the speed and torque of the generator are what get transformed into electric power.

A governor aims to regulate the speed of the turbine. This is done by the automatic adjustment of the fuel supply. The governing system or Governor is the main controller of the turbine, and it ensures stability.

In a hydroelectric turbine, the governor automatically regulates the amount of water, which is the fuel, going into the turbine in order to allow it to spin faster or slower.

By controlling the fuel going into the turbine, speed governors control the speed and torque of the generators, therefore, controlling their power output.

Let’s talk about the different control modes of a generator.

1) A generator in isochronous mode is suitable only for a single bus.
Think about your car in cruise control, your car will automatically increase or decrease the torque to the engine so you can maintain the previously designated speed.

That is what an isochronous generator control will constantly do in order to respond to more or less load requests.

2) When speaking about the power grid, many generators supply the same bus, in synchronous control mode.

Now imagine you are again in your car, but instead of only one engine and control system, you have two, and both are simultaneously trying to increase your speed. So, instead of reaching that speed, you overshoot and go even faster.

Now, the error is on the negative side, and again both engines and control systems are trying to respond to that error and would slow down too much, and so forth.

This would cause a constant instability of both engines fighting each other, and you would never be able to reach the designated speed as needed.

Bringing this analogy to the power grid, imagine each of those engines is a turbine generator, and if they are all constantly fighting each other, grid stability would never be reached.

Here is where Speed Droop comes into play… Speed droop allows generators to be paralleled to a common grid.
The governor uses Speed Droop as a FUNCTION to reduce the reference speed as the load increases… Without some form of droop, engine-speed regulation would always be unstable.

In relation to the power grid, instead of two, we have thousands of generators all interconnected. Droop allows all of them to work together to respond to all load requests.

Due to its importance to grid stability, there are bodies that govern the approaches and operations of machinery in the energy and electricity sector.

Through reliability guidelines, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) regulates governing aspects such as droop settings in power plant generators, with guidelines, such as:

– All generators equal to or above 10MW must have governors to operate.
– With power-plant generators, the governors for these generators must provide a 5% droop.

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You might want to review two of our other articles:

Power Plant Explained realpars.com/power-plant

Hydroelectric Power realpars.com/hydroelectric-power

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@aquibissa3390 2 years ago

The example given to explain this topic is extra ordinary and lifetime memorable. I eagerly wait for this channel videos.

@604Frank 9 months ago

How do you guys keep changing my life! Your videos are always so helpful and entertaining. Thank you for all the hard work you do!

@wilsonpushaty7725 2 years ago

Simply amazing! This channel has taught me a lot!

@cck1496 2 years ago

Good video. It is not as simple as mentioned. Operators usually cry when facing such situations i.e uncontrolled grid instability, load swings thus finally tripping the machine. There are so many variables to it.... Good work by Real Pars....