Application of Tier-2 Compensation Technique in the Expansion of Power Systems Corridors: A Case Study of General Steel Mills, Asaba

Investigations are done in this paper to see how Tier-2 compensation technique can expand the power systems corridor for the release of embedded transmission capacity. Mathematical models where developed for the savings in power bills, savings in energy and release of systems capacity for extra loadings. The General Steel Mills (GSM) Ltd, Asaba Nigeria was used as a case study to view the effect of locally generated VAr (shunt capacitors) at the buses. These generated VAr corrected the power factors of the load to as close to unity as possible and consequently released the overall systems capacity by 75% with energy and power bills saved to 66% and 23.17Mvar respectively. When this was achieved, the loads being supplied by the transformers was reduced hence the required reactive power by the loads were being supplied at the load locations. These relieve the transformers and the lines of some duties.