A Data-Driven Democratized Control Architecture for Regional Transmission Operators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a data-driven control architecture to enhance the resilience and operational decision-making of U.S. power grids, especially during extreme events, by enabling proactive islanding strategies through democratized tools.

Contribution

It presents a novel democratized control framework that integrates load profiling and DER disaggregation to support transmission operators in making strategic, proactive islanding decisions.

Findings

Effective load profiling at transmission buses.

Successful disaggregation of DER generation data.

Improved proactive islanding decision-making.

Abstract

As probably the most complicated and critical infrastructure system, U.S. power grids become increasingly vulnerable to extreme events such as cyber-attacks and severe weather, as well as higher DER penetrations and growing information mismatch among system operators, utilities (transmission or generation owners), and end-users. This paper proposes a data-driven democratized control architecture considering two democratization pathways to assist transmission system operators, with a targeted use case of developing online proactive islanding strategies. Detailed discussions on load capability profiling at transmission buses and disaggregation of DER generations are provided and illustrated with real-world utility data. By Combining network and operational constraints, transmission system operators can be equipped with new tools built on top of this architecture, to derive accurate, proactive, and strategic islanding decisions to incorporate the wide range of dynamic portfolios and needs when facing extreme events or unseen grid contingencies.