Adaptive Network Response to Line Failures in Power Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive control strategy for power systems that effectively localizes and mitigates line failures, reducing cascading effects and improving reliability compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel adaptive control approach leveraging network decomposition and frequency regulation to localize failures and enhance system robustness.

Findings

Significantly improves reliability under N-k security standards.

Effectively localizes failure impacts within initial outage areas.

Reduces load loss compared to classical AGC in simulations.

Abstract

Transmission line failures in power systems propagate and cascade non-locally. In this work, we propose an adaptive control strategy that offers strong guarantees in both the mitigation and localization of line failures. Specifically, we leverage the properties of network bridge-block decomposition and a frequency regulation method called the unified control. If the balancing areas over which the unified control operates coincide with the bridge-blocks of the network, the proposed strategy drives the post-contingency system to a steady state where the impact of initial line outages is localized within the areas where they occurred whenever possible, stopping the cascading process. When the initial line outages cannot be localized, the proposed control strategy provides a configurable design that progressively involves and coordinates more balancing areas. We compare the proposed control strategy with the classical Automatic Generation Control (AGC) on the IEEE 118-bus and 2736-bus test networks. Simulation results show that our strategy greatly improves overall reliability in terms of the N-k security standard, and localizes the impact of initial failures in the majority of the simulated contingencies. Moreover, the proposed framework incurs significantly less load loss, if any, compared to AGC, in all our case studies.