Power distribution systems are becoming much more active with increased penetration of distributed energy resources. Because of the intermittent nature of these resources, the stability of distribution systems under large disturbances and time-varying conditions is becoming a key issue in practical operations. Because the transmission lines in distribution systems are lossy, standard approaches in power system stability analysis do not readily apply and the understanding of transient stability remains open even for simplified models.
This paper proposes a novel equilibrium-independent transient stability analysis of distribution systems with lossy lines. We certify network-level stability by breaking the network into subsystems, and by looking at the equilibrium-independent passivity of each subsystem, the network stability is certified through a diagonal stability property of the interconnection matrix. This allows the analysis scale to large networked systems with time-varying equilibria. The proposed method gracefully extrapolates between lossless and lossy systems, and provides a simple yet effective approach to optimize control efforts with guaranteed stability regions. Case studies verify that the proposed method is much less conservative than existing approaches and also scales to large systems.