Passive electric grid stabilization prevents automatic generator syncing

Ars Technica : For an energy grid with a network of electrical generators to remain stable, the generators must balance their contribution or else one generator will become overloaded. When the system is stable, much of that balancing is done automatically; when one generator is slowed by an increased load, the others speed up. However, the coupling can result in other generators responding to the adjustments and compounding the instability. When the system is less stable, operators actively adjust the generators’ output to return to stability. Adilson Motter of Northwestern University in Illinois and his colleagues examined several real-world power systems to determine if there was a way to allow more passive maintenance of the system stability. They found that by incorporating banks of capacitors and inductors that are automatically activated when the load on the generator increases, the phase of the current could be reestablished, thereby ensuring that the generator remains synchronized with the others in the network and decreasing the likelihood of spreading instability. The researchers believe that could work in the real world as well, since they applied the system to models of actual power grids.