Risk Assessment for Operations in the Portuguese Transmission System The Key Issues for the Probability of Contingencies

摘要

The increasing competitiveness of the power systems' environment has created new challenges to the power system security assessment, demanding the development of new methodologies. Important aspects of this evolution are the unbundling of generation, transmission and distribution, caused by regulatory changes and creating a more competitive environment, the increased environmental concerns making it more difficult to build new assets, and the strong incentives to the generation from renewable energy sources. These factors contribute to the increasing stress on operating conditions and, consequently, cause more vulnerable networks. In recent years, the daily routine of transmission system operators has become more complex. The interconnected network is no longer just for mutual support; nowadays it has become the base platform for trading electricity allowing the shifting of increasing volumes of power across the system. Despite all the benefits that doubtless are many, from the operations perspective, the free electricity market presents more unpredictable and less stable power flows, a market-dependent generation pattern, also more unpredictable and less controllable. In addition to the latter, the significant amount of generation from renewable energy sources also contributes to place the system closer to its security limits. Therefore, and despite the bigger complexity and increased quality of service requirements, the energy supply and the optimization of resources remain a permanent goal, fulfilling all the security principles used for system operation.Incidents are naturally unpredictable and after the large disturbances which occurred in recent years (such as the blackouts on 9th May of 2000 in Portugal, on August 14th 2003 in the United States of America, on September 28th 2003 in Italy and in the European UCTE Network on November 4th 2006), the awareness of the risk of unpredictable disturbances has increased, and it has become essential for the decision-making process to have security indices that allow the operator to react in advance and to be aware of inherent risks, preventing harmful situations.The use of methodologies that take advantage of the actual real-time conditions in combination with past knowledge is extremely interesting in the system operation environment, because it gives a more accurate overview to the control room operators.Since long, the deterministic security assessment has been used to guarantee a high level security in system operations of Transmission Systems, being known as N-1 criterion. It tends to provide a conservative security region for protecting the system against severe contingencies. In the