North Europe power transmission system vulnerability during extreme space weather

Abstract

-Space weather driven by solar activity can induce geomagnetic disturbances at the Earth's surface that can affect power transmission systems. Variations in the geomagnetic field result in geomagnetically induced currents that can enter the system through its grounding connections, saturate transformers and lead to system instability and possibly collapse. This study analyzes the impact of extreme space weather on the northern part of the European power transmission grid for different transformer designs to understand its vulnerability in case of an extreme event. The behavior of the system was analyzed in its operational mode during a severe geomagnetic storm, and mitigation measures, like line compensation, were also considered. These measures change the topology of the system, thus varying the path of geomagnetically induced currents and inducing a local imbalance in the voltage stability superimposed on the grid operational flow. Our analysis shows that the North European power transmission system is fairly robust against extreme space weather events. When considering transformers more vulnerable to geomagnetic storms, only few episodes of instability were found in correspondence with an existing voltage instability due to the underlying system load. The presence of mitigation measures limited the areas of the network in which bus voltage instabilities arise with respect to the system in which mitigation measures are absent.

Geomagnetically Induced Currents Caused by Interplanetary Shocks With Different Impact Angles and Speeds

“…Historically, most studies involving GIC effects on the ground focus on events with severe geomagnetic activity, or geomagnetic storms (Bolduc, 2002;Ngwira et al, 2013;Oliveira & Ngwira, 2017;Pulkkinen et al, 2005), with emphasis on regions poleward of 60 ∘ magnetic latitude (Piccinelli & Krausmann, 2018;Pulkkinen et al, 2005Pulkkinen et al, , 2012Wik et al, 2008). For example, the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power system in North America 10.1029/2018SW001880 was caused by the geomagnetic storm of 13-14 March 1989(Béland & Small, 2005Bolduc, 2002).…”

Renewability and Robustness Analysis and Review for Sustainable-Technology Propulsion Systems in Modern Transportation Infrastructure Administration

“…Even though a geomagnetic storm was classified as a low-probability event, this situation poses a high infrastructural risk [119]. Such geomagnetic storms can affect modern electronics, power transmission, and communication equipment [120,121], damaging or temporarily disabling electronic circuits. Although prediction models using deep neural networks were successfully implemented [122], artificial intelligence prototypes are often prone to misleading identifications.…”

Algorithm for Analysis of Power Grid Vulnerability to Geomagnetic Disturbances

“…It has a realistic number of nodes and can estimate the real situation with an acceptable precision. The Scandinavian grid was also analyzed in other studies (Piccinelli & Krausmann, ; Pirjola et al, ; Viljanen et al, ). The specific feature of our study is that only the 400 kV network is considered, since GIC prefers to flow over the lines with low resistivity.…”