Anatomy of power system blackouts and preventive strategies by rational supervision and control of protection systems

摘要

This report establishes the concept of hidden failures in relays and associated devices used for the protection of electric power systems. A hidden failure is a defect such as a component failure, inappropriate setting or incorrect external connection that remains undetected until some other system event causes the hidden failure to initiate a cascading outage. Associated with the study of hidden failures, this report examines the impact such defects might have by defining regions of vulnerability. A region of vulnerability is the area of the system in which a hidden failure will be activated. To determine such areas we have established criteria associated with load flows and steady-state stability, such as lack of convergence, and employed a technique known as importance sampling in which the simulation is done with the probabilities altered so that the rare event happens more frequently. Our purpose is to provide a framework for further research into relay vulnerability, possibly using adaptive techniques to eliminate hidden defects. We believe control strategies can be developed to prevent cascading normal operations from developing into severe outages by extending the present criteria using steady-state stability and load flow studies into the area of transient stability, and further research into importance sampling would provide significant benefits in evaluating corrective actions.