Abstract
In recent years, the electricity sector undergoes a restructuring process, operationally and commercially, moving from a vertical integrated model to a market oriented model. With past and current difficulties in building new transmission lines and the significant increase in power transactions associated with competitive electricity markets, maintaining system security, with special regard to voltage instability/collapse issues, is more than ever one of the main concerns for market and system operators. Voltage is most readily controlled by adjustments to reactive power injections in power system. Reactive power can be produced and absorbed by both generation and transmission equipment. System operators, transmission owners, generators, customers, power marketers and government regulators need to pay close attention to voltage control. This paper is devoted to the study of the reactive power support for dynamic voltage stability of a restructured electric power system. A severe contingency situation was simulated. The automatic voltage regulators of the generating units and the mechanically switched shunt capacitors were modelled. The simulation results were obtained using the commercial transient software package EUROSTAG. Finally, some conclusions that provide a better understanding of the voltage collapse phenomena are pointed out.

Abstract
Actually, the electric energy has a high importance in all activities, namely, the economic activity and on its development. Sectors of activity like, communications, transports, illumination and many others industrial processes are sustained. With the increase of the global energy needs, and considering the Kyoto's protocol, the importance of green power as been increased. Based in that scenario, it's easy to understand the appearance of new low capacity producers, which should satisfy certain operation parameters to be connected to the network. Connections of small electric energy producers lead to some problems related with the voltage stability on transport and distribution systems, being crucial the satisfaction of several parameters with the objective to guarantee the electric system stability. In this article, the state of the art for the stability problems in power systems is made, being specially analyzed the Portuguese case. It's also analyzed lower producers response on voltage collapse and the parameters that they should satisfy in those situations.

Abstract
Nowadays when utilities are faced with increasing requirements regarding Quality of Service, it is important to be aware that severe contingencies can happen, in an unpredictable way which far exceeds all the security principles used for planning and system operation. In any electricity transmission system, a security condition must be assured - either in steady or in transient state - otherwise the essential service provided to costumers could be severely jeopardized. Present day Quality of Service requirements that are imposed on the electrical utility companies force them to develop efficient processes to analyze and react to incidents that can happen in an unpredictable way and far exceed all the security principles used. The simulation and analysis of these scenarios allow us to minimize the risk of system unbalance and voltage collapse. The steady state simulations of the Portuguese Transmission System were made in PSS/E software from Siemens Power Transmission Distribution, Inc., using savecases that represent pictures of the real system. The simulation results presented focus on aspects like energy not supplied, generation lost and topological changes resulting from an incident, which will affect mainly the power flow distribution within the grid elements that will remain in service (connected) and the voltage level in the system bus-bars. These results allow us to be better prepared to face these severe disturbances, defining procedures for emergency situation and training the control room operators.

Abstract
Performance indices are used to rank the impact of contingencies in power system. security studies. In this paper it is proposed a new approach to the use of performance indices to contingencies screening. The developed methodology produces a screening and classification of the system outages. The developed technique is applied to a test power system and the results obtained were analyzed. Finally, some conclusions that provide a valuable contribution to the understanding of the power system security analysis are pointed out.

Abstract
This paper presents a study of the application of artificial neural network (ANN) to the evaluation of the distance to the voltage collapse point. Voltage stability has been of the major concern in power system operation. To prevent these problems, technical staff evaluates frequently the distance of the operation state to the voltage collapse point. This distance normally is calculated with power flow equations. This classic technique is very slow for electric power systems with large dimension. In abnormal exploration situations it may introduce serious limitation in the voltage stability analysis process. So, the application of a fast and reliable evaluation technique is very important to diminish the evaluation time. This paper also presents the method FSQV (Full sum dQ/dV) for the detection of the collapse point.

Abstract
The paper presents a study of the convergence characteristics and an assessment of the performance of the algorithm used to solve power system state estimation problem. The algorithm is studied to determine and compare the convergence patterns using several measurement sets consisting of line flows, bus injections, voltage magnitudes and line currents. The algorithm was tested on different IEEE test systems. Results related to the test with IEEE 14 bus bar system are presented.