A Generic Modeling and Development Approach for WECC Composite Load Model

Abstract

The composite load model (CLM) proposed by Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) gains increasing traction in the industry, particularly in North America. At the same time, it is recognized that further improvements in the structure, initialization and aggregation methods are needed. However, lack of an open implementation of WECC CLM becomes a roadblock for many researchers to work on improving it. This paper presents the first open reference implementation of WECC CLM. Individual load components and the CLM are first developed and tested in Matlab, then translated to the high performance computing (HPC), parallel simulation platform GridPACK. Main contributions of the paper include: 1) presenting some important yet undocumented details of modeling and initializing the CLM, particularly for a parallel simulation platform like GridPACK; 2) implementation details of the load components such as the single-phase air conditioner motor; 3) implementing the CLM in a modular and extensible manner. The implementation has been tested at both the component as well as system levels and bench-marked against commercial simulation programs.