In the recent past, due to regulatory hurdles and the inability to expand transmission systems, the bulk power system is increasingly being operated close to its limits. Among the various phenomenon encountered, static voltage stability has received increased attention among electric utilities. One approach to investigate static voltage stability is to run a set of power flow simulations and derive the voltage stability limit based on the analysis of power flow results. Power flow problems are formulated as a set of nonlinear algebraic equations usually solved by iterative methods. The most commonly used method is the Newton-Raphson method. However, at the static voltage stability limit, the Jacobian becomes singular. Hence, the power flow solution may fail to converge close to the true limit.

To carefully examine the limitations of conventional power flow software packages in determining voltage stability limits, two lines of research are pursued in this study. The first line of the research is to investigate the capability of different power flow solution techniques, such as conventional power flow and non-iterative power flow techniques to obtain the voltage collapse point. The software packages used in this study include Newton-based methods contained in PSSE, PSLF, PSAT, PowerWorld, VSAT and a non-iterative technique known as the holomorphic embedding method (HEM).

The second line is to investigate the impact of the available control options and solution parameter settings that can be utilized to obtain solutions closer to the voltage collapse point. Such as the starting point, generator reactive power limits, shunt device control modes, area interchange control, and other such parameters.