Resilience Analysis and Cascading FailureModeling of Power Systems under Extreme Temperatures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a detailed AC power flow model that considers extreme temperature effects on power system stability, highlighting how weather-induced load and line rating changes can trigger cascading failures and voltage instability.

Contribution

It presents a novel model incorporating weather effects into cascading failure analysis, including load, line ratings, and control strategies, verified through simulations on a standard system.

Findings

Temperature disturbances increase risk of cascading failures.

Correlated load and line outages lead to voltage instability.

Control strategies can mitigate failure propagation.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an AC power flow based cascading failure model that explicitly considers external weather conditions, extreme temperatures in particular, and evaluates the impact of extreme temperature on the initiation and propagation of cascading blackouts. Specifically, load and dynamic line rating changes are modeled due to temperature disturbance, the probabilities for transmission line and generator outages are evaluated, and the timing for each type of events is carefully calculated to decide the actual event sequence. It should be emphasized that the correlated events, in the advent of external temperature changes, could together contribute to voltage instability. Besides, we model undervoltage load shedding and operator re-dispatch as control strategies for preventing the propagation of cascading failures. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified by simulation results on the RTS-96 3-area system and it is found that temperature disturbances can lead to correlated load change and line/generator tripping, which together will greatly increase the risk of cascading and voltage instability. Critical temperature change, critical area with temperature disturbance, identification of most vulnerable buses, and comparison of different control strategies are also carefully investigated.