Comparability of emergency control strategies with different instability modes is the key issue to decide which control strategy to be implemented. This paper considers that the essential factor causing instability should be used to form a unified standard to assess the effectiveness of control strategies with different instability modes. Thus a switching control stabilization principle was proposed based on elimination of the unbalanced energy between mechanical and electrical energies of generator sets. Along this way, the difficulty of seeking a Lyapunov function was circumvented. According to the principle, an emergency control algorithm framework was established to handle transient stability assessment, control location selection and control amount evaluation. Within the framework, this paper studied instability mode transition, then proposed an algorithm based on prediction function and a new approach to normalized stability margin stemmed from static EEAC method, which can increase comparability of various control locations. The simulations on the New-England System verified the proposed emergency control method for stabilizing transient stability.emergency control, switching system, unbalanced energy