IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2020 - 82

book reviews

an essential reference
a useful update of a classic text

THIS ISSUE'S "BOOK REVIEW" COLumn discusses Power System Control
and Stability, third edition, written by
Vijay Vittal and James D. McCalley.
This reviewer writes, "this new edition
is a must-read for graduate students and
researchers and an essential reference
for all practicing engineers in the power
and energy industry."

Power System Control and
Stability, Third Edition
By Vijay Vittal and James D. McCalley
Power System Control and Stability is one of most widely used books in
power engineering. I still own a copy of
the original version of this classic text,
and I vividly recall it being one of the
first books I read as a Ph.D. student
more than 25 years ago. Prof. Vittal and
Prof. McCalley have done an excellent
job of updating this newly published
third edition. They have remained faithful
to the spirit of the original text, written
by Prof. Paul M. Anderson and Prof.
A.A. Fouad, while making significant
updates of the original material and adding much-needed new information so
that the book remains an indispensable
text and reference for the present-day student and practicing engineer.
Since the publication of the first edition, there has been tremendous change
in the industry, particularly in the arenas of renewable energy systems and
load modeling and the increased appliDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2019.2954687
Date of current version: 19 February 2020

ieee power & energy magazine

cation flexible ac transmission systems
(FACTS), such as static volt-ampere
reactive (var) systems. This new edition covers all of these topics in new
chapters. The structure of the book is
well done and keeps the subject matter flowing in a logical sequence. The
chapters on the classic materials, such
as the modeling of synchronous generators, excitation systems, and turbine
governors, are still valid and of great
importance to both the student and
practicing power engineer. These chapters have all been updated to capture
some of the new developments in these
areas since the second edition of the
book. For example, the chapter on gas
turbines provides new materials based
on the work done at CIGRE in the early

to mid-2000s on the improved modeling of gas turbines for both simple and
combined-cycle power plants.
The new material in the book is also
very well done and matches the style
and coverage of the traditional subjects
in the original text. The new chapter
on load modeling is a truly excellent
addition and covers the most salient
technical developments in the last decade relative to load modeling, which
has been led by the Western Electricity
Coordinating Council's Modeling and
Validation Working Group (WECC
MVWG), researchers at such organizations as the Electric Power Research
Institute (EPRI), and Prof. Vittal himself at Arizona State University. Furthermore, the chapter covers the basics
of distributed energy resource modeling and how this is incorporated into
the aggregated load model.
Similarly, two new chapters provide excellent coverage of some of
the salient aspects of standard models developed in the last decade,
again primarily within the WECC
MVWG, for modeling of static var
systems and renewable energy systems, with significant research done,
once again, at EPRI. The chapter on
FACTSs covers the modeling and dynamic performance of thyristor-controller series capacitors.
An enhanced chapter on small-signal
stability has been also included, which
is again important since an understanding of such phenomena is critical for the
practicing power engineer. This chapter
march/april 2020

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2020

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