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Digital Technology Revives Old Method of

Voltage Regulation
Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM
By Chien C. Tschang, New York State Electric & Gas, and James H. Harlow, Harlow Engineering
Associat

It is common practice to operate substation transformers in parallel.

The operational benefits of paralleling transformers include improved
maintenance, reliability and power quality. Also, distributing the load Substations
evenly usually extends the life of transformers.
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Operating the parallel paths often involves three-phase power Transformers
transformers equipped with load tap changers (LTCs) or, by user Electric Utilities in Georgia
preference, non-LTC transformers in conjunction with step-voltage Increase Reward for
regulators. When the latter is selected, the regulators are most often Identification of Copper
of single-phase construction. Thieves
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When operating the LTCs in parallel, the transformers (or regulators) Load
must be kept on as nearly the same tap position as is realistically Running Into the Wind
possible. When the taps are not on the same position, the paths in »More from this section
parallel do not exhibit the same voltage transformation ratio, and a
circulating current is driven through the transformers and the
associated bus work. This is undesirable because it represents a real power loss.

The two procedures most commonly used to accomplish the parallel operation are known as the
“circulating current method” and “master follower method.” The circulating current method
dominates in the United States, but the master follower method is mainly used worldwide. Each of
these methods has advantages and disadvantages. The key common disadvantage is the necessity
for communications between the controls of the tap changers of the paralleled devices. This usually
is accomplished with circuits interconnecting the controls, where the objective is either to signal the
respective controls of the circulating current so that the next transformer to accomplish a step
change is the one that will bring the tap positions nearer to the same position, or to signal from the
“master” transformer to the “follower” that the master has performed a tap change operation and
the follower needs to accomplish the same action. With the circulating current method, it is
accepted that the tap positions may be one or more steps apart for extended periods.

Another little-known procedure, the negative (or reverse) reactance method, can be used to control
the apparatus in parallel. This procedure was used in the past but fell from favor due to an inherent

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error in the operation or from the difficulty in selecting the setpoints for its use. The technique is
seldom used today despite several positive attributes, the most notable being that it doesn't require
any intercontrol wiring. Each control operates wholly independently of the other, yet the controls
accomplish the objective of biasing the sensed voltage so that, as with the circulating current
method, the controls command the tap changers to maintain equal tap positions. Perhaps the most
interesting fact, in this regard, is that every LTC control in service that conforms to the applicable
standard, ANSI/IEEE Std. C57.15, already includes all the provisions necessary to accomplish the
negative reactance paralleling.

Understanding Negative Reactance Control

As is explicit in the name, negative reactance paralleling uses the negative polarity capability of the
reactance setpoint of line drop compensation. To understand the principle, consider that line drop
compensation (LDC) is normally set on an LTC control to model the system to control the voltage at
the load, which may be some distance from the transformer or regulator location. Normally that load
will be at a high lagging power factor and the resistive component of the LDC (LDCR) will dominate
the correction. When transformers operate in parallel, identical except for their respective tap
positions, the circulating current is almost wholly reactive; that is, low power factor. The LDC
component dominating the correction in that case is the reactive component of the LDC (LDC X).

In the usual case, a lagging power factor load and setpoint values of LDC R and LDC X are positive
so both elements will act to boost the voltage at the substation bus to hold the voltage desired at
the location of the load. The setpoint voltage is the voltage desired at the load (see the phasor
diagram in Fig. 2). The reference phasor is typically about 118 V to 124 V. If there were no load
current, or if the LDC R and LDC X values were zero, then the IR and IX phasors would be of zero
magnitude. With IR = 0 (VR= 0) and IX = 0 (VX = 0), the voltage at the load would be calculated by
the control model to be identical to that at the substation bus. As line drop compensation comes
into play, the VR and VX phasors result in a boost voltage required at the bus to compensate for the
drop in the line.

Now consider what would happen if the LDC X value is “reversed” or made negative. The lagging
reactive current will multiply by the LDC X (negative) value to buck the voltage or lower the tap
position. Similarly, a leading reactive current will multiply by the LDCX (negative) value to boost the
voltage, or raise the tap position. It must be anticipated that identical transformers operating in
parallel will occasionally be on different tap positions. In this case, the transformer on the higher
tap position will drive a current that lags the voltage. By the nature of the system, that current will
lead the voltage in the transformer that is operating on the lower tap position. Figure 3 illustrates
the situation with the transformers on different tap positions. The circulating current is “outbound” in
the higher tap transformer (seen as a lagging power factor) and “inbound” in the lower tap
transformer (seen as a leading power factor). The net effect of this circulating current acting on a
negative value of LDC X is to bias an LTC driving a circulating current (on a higher tap position) to
“lower” and to bias an LTC receiving a circulating current (on the lower tap position) to “raise.” Thus,
in a manner similar to the circulating current method, this satisfies the overall objective of having
the tap changers stay on the same or nearly the same tap position while properly regulating the
system voltage.

Hill Street Substation

The Hill Street Substation of NYSEG serves the downtown area of Hornell, New York, U.S. Contrary
to the more common industry practice, NYSEG operates much of the system, including Hill Street,

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ungrounded at 4800-V open delta. Planning indicated the need for a parallel transformer/regulator
installation.

A cost study was made for the paralleling control to operate the regulators' tap changers. To do
that by the usual circulating current method took an additional US$30,000. It was decided this was
a good application in which to apply the negative reactance paralleling method, as it would involve
no additional hardware or installation cost. All needed control functions are provided as standard in
the control routinely supplied with the regulators. The regulators operating in open delta did
introduce an additional complexity but that was peculiar to the connection and not to the negative
reactance application. The Hill Street regulators are believed to be the first open-delta application
operating in parallel by the negative reactance method.

Hill Street Application

Figure 1 shows the regulators at Hill Street Substation. There are four single-phase regulators
produced by Cooper Power Systems, each 933 kVA, 7620 V (1225 A) operating ungrounded at
4800 V. In the open-delta application, two of the regulators are said to be “leading” and two are
“lagging,” referring to the fact that the current signals from the regulator CT lead or lag the voltage
signals by 30 degrees at unity power factor load. This fact is a non-issue as the phasing corrections
are made automatically in the associated Cooper CL-5E controls. The two leading and the two
lagging single-phase regulators are each in series with a 7500 kVA, 34.5- to 5.04-kV three-phase
transformer wound delta-delta. The transformers each have 6.7% impedance to limit the current
that will circulate when the regulators are not matched in tap position.

This system is modeled in an Excel spreadsheet. The calculation accepts as inputs the presumed
substation loading in terms of magnitude and power factor. This was based on about 6000 kVA of
load at 0.99 lagging power factor. In sequence it is determined that:

The current that will circulate in the substation when there is a one tap position step
discrepancy between two regulators is 69.6 A. This is the reactive current in the 4.8-kV bus
(the ICIRC current of Fig. 3), which is scaled to 13.9 mA on the 200 mA base of the control
and is sensed by the LDC algorithm of the controls.

The value of the LDC X setpoint is iteratively selected. The circulating current found above will
act on the setting chosen. The value selected is effectively a sensitivity adjustment for the
response of the control to the one-step tap position discrepancy. The value may later be
adjusted to produce greater or lesser sensitivity to the extreme ranges of load magnitude and
power factor anticipated for the substation. The value finally selected for use at Hill Street is
LDC X = -10 V, which produces a response in the control of 0.60 V when one-step
discrepancy circulating current flows.

Any control error is absolved for the selected load condition by selection of a positive LDC R
value used in conjunction with the negative LDC X value. There is a value for LDC R that will
make the control error exactly zero for the presumed load. This is found by multiple iterations
to be LDC R = +1.6 V.

Different load conditions are tested to observe the error introduced as the power factor varies.

The actual load power factor at Hill Street stays uncannily close to 1.0. The table on page 37
highlights the study results.

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A value of LDC R = +0.5 V is used at the Hill Street Substation. The band center voltage is 123 V
with a bandwidth of 2.5 V. It is anticipated that the control error will stay below 1 V.

As a backup, the voltage limit control on the CL-5E is set for 120 V and 126 V. Should the system
load change to an extent that the error is > ± 3 V, the VLC will restrict the output voltage to those
limits.

The CL-5E control offers the opportunity to record selected operating parameters. “Snapshots” are
recorded every 15 minutes for 30 hours. Per the associated log, the tap position of paralleled
regulators always stayed within one tap position of each other. Of the 120 recordings for each pair
of regulators, the regulators operating in parallel were recorded to be operating on the same tap
position 87% of the time. This is excellent operational performance.

The controls were set to hold the output voltage to 123 ± 1.25 V. Remarkably, in only one snapshot,
and then on only one pair of regulators, did the record show the voltage digression to be more than
1 V from the 123 V set-point. This performance is more meaningfully stated to note that the
arithmetic mean voltage for the 480 recorded values is 122.8 V with a variance of only 0.266 V.

Conclusion
Negative reactance paralleling has seldom been used for many years due to a combination of
factors, including the difficulty to establish control setpoints, know when the control is operating
correctly and overcome the perception that the technique is fundamentally inaccurate. With modern
controls, mathematically efficient calculating procedures and improved system operation (especially
as due to maintaining improved system load power factor), these factors disappear or are of much
less concern.

As evidenced by the experience at the Hill Street Substation of NYSEG, there are applications
where the procedure is efficiently and cost-effectively employed. Others may gain appreciable cost
savings from use of this technique.

Chien C. Tschang is a senior planning engineer at New York State Electric and Gas Corp. He
received a BS degree from Rochester Institute of Technology and a MBA degree from Binghamton
University. Tschang has 13 years of experience in the distribution planning field and provides
technical assistance to district offices in the areas of general planning studies, voltage flickers
studies, construction forecast reviews and reliability studies. He also has been involved with
specialized studies that assess the impact on the distribution system from line losses and
distributed generation. cctschang@nyseg.com

James H. Harlow is an independent consultant specializing in matters of application and design of

transformer tap changing under load and step-voltage regulators, having previous experience in
these activities with Siemens Energy and Automation Inc. and Beckwith Electric Co. His
professional experience includes serving the IEEE Power Engineering Society as vice president of
Technical Activities and as chairman of the Transformers Committee. He is the editor of Electric
Power Transformer Engineering, CRC Press, 2004.
j.h.harlow@ieee.orgwww.harlowengineering.com

Modern Considerations of Negative Reactance Paralleling

While the procedures for negative reactance paralleling have been known for many years, it has

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been the advent of the modern digital LTC controls and computers that have revived the negative
reactance method of paralleling.

Digital controls are precise in setting parameters and far more accurate than controls from 50 years
ago. Past application guidelines stated that compensator settings should be determined by trial-
and-error on the system, apparently because the alternative, manual calculations, would be much
too tedious. Today, operating setpoints can be determined with a much greater degree of accuracy
using computer software to model system conditions.

Digital controls can be programmed to record and display the present and past operating state of
the system. This information is invaluable when using the negative reactance paralleling procedure
because some voltage error is introduced due to variations in load power factor and magnitude. The
error can be constrained to acceptable values by judiciously selecting the line drop compensation
setpoints using system load information. Even greater accuracy can be obtained where shunt
capacitors are used to maintain a high load power factor. The voltage limit control feature found on
all digitial controls can be used to avoid an aggravated problem if system conditions digress from
those originally anticipated.

The key benefit of this method is the elimination of control communication, which provides cost
savings and improves reliability by removing potential control issues with the master/follower and
the circulating current methods.

Voltage error, on 120-V base, encountered as load power factor digresses from the nominal value.
Study presumes nominal load power factor of
1.00 0.99 lag
The control error in volts
The control error in volts is
is
For X=-8
If the actual For X=-15 V For X=-10 V For X=-8 V For X=-10 V
V (R=1.2
load pf is (R=0.3 V) (R=0.1 V) (R=0.1 V) (R=1.6 V)
V)
0.94 Lg 0.73 0.60
0.95 Lg 0.88 0.62 0.51
0.96 Lg 1.01 0.79 0.50 0.42
0.97 Lg 0.88 0.69 0.36 0.31
0.98 Lg 1.06 0.72 0.56 0.20 0.18
0.99 Lg 0.76 0.51 0.40 -0.01 0.01
1.00 0.01 0.01 0.00 -0.52 -0.39
0.99 Ld -0.74 -0.49 -0.40 -1.02 -0.79
0.98 Ld -1.05 -0.69 -0.57 -0.95
0.97 Ld -0.85 -0.69 -1.08
0.96 Ld -0.98 -0.80
0.95 Ld -1.10 -0.89

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