A study of the operational issues of the transition and deregulation of Taiwan power industry and systems, with emphasis on system stability, reactive power and power wheeling

During the past two decades the electric utility industry has experienced a period of rapid and irreversible change. Deregulation and competition are causing fundamental reorganization of the infrastructure of traditional electric utilities worldwide. The vertically integrated monopolistic industry is being transformed into a horizontally integrated competitive structure in some countries. The future electric power industry structure, and the usage of the transmission system, will be in forms that will encourage greater competition.; In recent years, the shortage of generation, high electricity cost, low efficiencies and issues of economics and safety of nuclear power plants are major problems in the Taiwan power industry. The major reason for these problems is that the power industry structure is monopoly franchised which does not provide a strong incentive for the industry to promote its performance.; Actually, in Taiwan, many benefits will appear in electric power deregulation, which will include lower electricity cost, increasing the efficiency of the power plant, increasing the new generation capacity, automatically solving the economical issue of nuclear power plants; and more customer choice and protection. Therefore, all Taiwan people and industries can enjoy these profits from this change. It appears worthy to push this reform.; However, many problems will also emerge from the changing current structure to a competitive environment such as transmission charge, reactive power charge, security concern and operation challenge. These problems will jeopardize the development of the power industry if they can not be solved properly. The main purpose of this research is to state some problems, including power wheeling charge, reactive power responsibility and charge, and stability concern during the transition and deregulation structure and to try to help make the industry transition smoother in Taiwan, since these problems are not defined clearly in the current power industry. In this research, the real Taipower system is used for the analysis and illustration of reactive power responsibility and wheeling charge, and the FPC IPP system is used to analyze the effects on Taipower system stability. Finally, a competitive structure, implementation stages and special considerations for the deregulation of the Taiwan power system are proposed.