Topological analysis of the power grid and mitigation strategies against cascading failures

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents a complex systems overview of a power grid network. In recent years, concerns about the robustness of the power grid have grown because of several cascading outages in different parts of the world. In this paper, cascading effect has been simulated on three different networks, the IEEE 300 bus test system, the IEEE 118 bus test system, and the WSCC 179 bus equivalent model. Power Degradation has been discussed as a measure to estimate the damage to the network, in terms of load loss and node loss. A network generator has been developed to generate graphs with characteristics similar to the IEEE standard networks and the generated graphs are then compared with the standard networks to show the effect of topology in determining the robustness of a power grid. Three mitigation strategies, Homogeneous Load Reduction, Targeted Range-Based Load Reduction, and Use of Distributed Renewable Sources in combination with Islanding, have been suggested. The Homogeneous Load Reduction is the simplest to implement but the Targeted Range-Based Load Reduction is the most effective strategy.

A Critical Review of Robustness in Power Grids Using Complex Networks Concepts

“…The resilience has been carried out in term of flow availability. In a similar approach, [172] makes use of power flow in the analysis of a synthetic (IEEE bus test system) high-voltage network with N = 550 nodes and M = 800 unweighted links. The resilience is assessed in terms of the influence in network connectivity and power degradation.…”

“…Link attack has been adopted in [35,152,155,169,172,184,188,192,193], which also include both topological-and hybrid-based approaches. There are a few works that have carried out both analyses [7,85,112,117,151,170].…”

“…The average path length formulated in Equation (4) has been utilized to analyze the topological aspects of the Italian power grid [148]; the topological vulnerability of three European electric power grids (Spanish 400 kV grid, French 400 kV grid, and Italian 380 kV grid) [152]; the vulnerability of the European Nordic power grid (which includes the national transmission grids of Sweden, Finland, Norway and the main part of Denmark) [111]; the western USA power grid [70,111,154]; the topological structure and static tolerance to errors and attacks of thirty-three different European power grids [20]; a synthetic Watts-Strogatz power grid [169]; the IEEE 300 power grid [155,173]; the medium and low-voltage grids in northern Netherlands [117]; the IEEE 118 bus test systems [172]; and high-voltage power grids in China [7,174]. 2.…”

Technology-related disasters: A survey towards disaster-resilient Software Defined Networks

“…This failure had also a visible impact on the interrelated Internet infrastructure, affecting almost half of all Internet autonomous systems. Pahwa et al [9] used simulations to analyze the vulnerability of power grids to cascading failures. They found that careful post-failure load redistribution can help averting cascades.…”

Optimal intentional islanding to enhance the robustness of power grid networks

“…In simple words, when one failure leads to successive failure of other elements of the grid, leading to huge losses, the process is called a cascading failure. Some strategies such as reciprocal altruism [5], changing the dynamic equilibrium of the system to a point of self-organized criticality [6], [11], and different load shedding schemes [7], [8], [9], [10] have been suggested in the past for reducing the effects of cascading failures.…”