The Risk of Hidden Failures to the United States Electrical Grid and Potential for Mitigation

TL;DR

This paper examines hidden failures in the US electrical grid, analyzing their causes, risks, and mitigation strategies to prevent cascading failures and improve grid reliability.

Contribution

It offers an in-depth overview of hidden failure causes, risk assessment methods, and proposes mitigation techniques to enhance grid resilience.

Findings

Identification of critical locations prone to hidden failures

Analysis of how hidden failures lead to cascading events

Proposed mitigation strategies for protective relay failures

Abstract

Hidden failures present a noticeable impact to the reliability of the United States electrical grid. These hazards are responsible for protective device misoperations and can cause multiple-element contingencies across nearby components, greatly increasing the likelihood of cascading events. This paper provides an in-depth overview of the causes and risks of hidden failures and discusses methods for identifying critical locations where hidden failures could pose a risk of cascading failure, with the ultimate goal being to identify efficient mitigation methods that can prevent their occurrence in protective relays.