ABB’s Award-Winning FACTS Solution Enhances Reliability & Cuts Emissions for Dallas‑Fort Worth Power Grid

ABB’s award‑winning FACTS solution is helping Oncor, Texas’s largest transmission and distribution company, secure grid reliability across the Dallas‑Fort Worth metropolitan area—while integrating variable wind generation, reacting to disturbances in record‑breaking 20 ms, and saving almost one million megawatt‑hours of energy and associated CO₂ emissions each year.

Oncor serves roughly three million homes and businesses, including most of Dallas‑Fort Worth, the United States’ fourth‑largest metro, which has a combined population of 6.5 million.

In April 2010, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality honored the project with the state’s highest award for environmental excellence, citing its elimination of an estimated 563 hours of peak‑load generation and the annual energy savings of nearly one million MWh.

The world’s largest and fastest‑acting concentration of static var compensators (SVCs) at the Parkdale substation in Dallas‑Fort Worth. The SVCs respond to grid disturbances in just 20 milliseconds.

These SVCs provide fast‑acting reactive‑power compensation in high‑voltage networks, stabilizing voltage and current fluctuations and allowing more power to flow through the grid.

Voltage swings are typically triggered by peak demand, but Dallas‑Fort Worth also faces long‑term stress from steady demand growth, retirement of local power plants, and the growing share of wind and remote generation in Texas’s energy mix.

Integrating Renewable Energy

The SVCs enable Oncor to incorporate renewable generation while reducing reliance on fossil‑fuel‑based local power, cutting greenhouse‑gas emissions and benefiting the local environment.

Since June 2009, the Parkdale SVCs have successfully responded to 38 grid events that threatened stability. The success has prompted Oncor to order two additional SVCs, now being installed at Renner substation in Plano, a northern Dallas suburb.

SVCs are part of ABB’s flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS) portfolio, which can increase existing transmission capacity by up to 50 % while simultaneously improving reliability.

ABB delivered the Parkdale solution in a record 14 months. With more than 700 FACTS installations worldwide—roughly half of the global market—ABB remains a global leader in this technology.

For more information, visit ABB.com.