A LASSO-Inspired Approach for Localizing Power System Infeasibility

TL;DR

This paper introduces a LASSO-inspired regularization technique to identify and localize the causes of power system infeasibility, aiding in system expansion and corrective actions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel regularization method for power flow analysis that effectively localizes network infeasibilities and sources of blackouts.

Findings

Successfully localized a blackout source to a single bus in a large interconnection model.

Demonstrated effectiveness in identifying infeasibility causes in complex power grids.

Applicable for system planning and reliability enhancement.

Abstract

A method is proposed to identify and localize the cause of network collapse with augmented power flow analysis for a grid model with insufficient resources. Owing to heavy network loading, insufficient generation, component failures and unavoidable disturbances, power grid models can sometimes fail to converge to a feasible solution for a steady-state power flow study. For applications such as system expansion planning, it is desirable to locate the system buses that are contributing to network infeasibilities to facilitate corrective actions. This paper proposes a novel LASSO-inspired regularization of the power flow matrix that enforces sparsity to localize and quantify infeasibilities in the network. One of the examples demonstrates how the proposed method is capable of localizing a source of blackout to a single dominant bus on an 80k+ bus eastern interconnection model.