Easy SimAuto (ESA): A Python Package that Simplifies Interacting with PowerWorld Simulator

Abstract

The electric power system is an essential cornerstone of modern society, enabling everything from the internet to refrigeration. Due to a variety of forces including climate change, changing economics, and the digital computer revolution, the electric grid is undergoing a period of major change. In order to overcome current and upcoming challenges in the electric power system, such as integrating renewable resources into a system that was not designed for intermittent power sources, researchers and industry practitioners must simulate the electric grid, its component devices, and its operation. PowerWorld Simulator is a commercial power systems simulation tool that contains a suite of modeling and simulation features including power flow simulation, contingency analysis, transient stability simulation, and more (PowerWorld Corporation, 2020). The Simulator Automation Server (SimAuto) add-on for PowerWorld provides an application programming interface (API) that operates in-memory, allowing users to rapidly configure, run, and obtain results for simulations. PowerWorld and SimAuto are commonly used throughout the research community as well as in industry.

Toward Efficient Wide-Area Identification of Multiple Element Contingencies in Power Systems

“…In this section, we apply our approach to two synthetic test cases, a 200-bus and 500-bus case respectively, from the benchmark library for electric power grids in Texas A&M University [17]. We implement our approach in Python and use ESA [18] to communicate with PowerWorld Simulator to collect LODFs. The results are computed using a laptop with an i7 1.80 GHz processor and 16 GB of RAM.…”

Integration of Renewable Generators in Synthetic Electric Grids for Dynamic Analysis

“…Then, we will present another example using the 10K-bus case and adopt some transient stability metrics to validate its transient stability performance. The simulation is done in PowerWorld Simulator and a python package, ESA, is used to obtain the simulation results [24]. Examples illustrate the renewable generators integrated case have stable dynamic response with well-damped oscillations.…”

Synthetic PMU Data Creation Based on Generative Adversarial Network Under Time-varying Load Conditions

“…Given one per-unit load profile created as an input, we first scale all loads and generation in the simulation model to guarantee balanced supply and demand and then solve for the power flow every time step to obtain the voltage measurements. This process is implemented using Python codes that use the ESA package [26] to interact with the PowerWorld simulator using its SimuAuto function.…”