Robust Sequential Steady-State Analysis of Cascading Outages

Abstract

Simulating potential cascading failures can be useful for avoiding or mitigating such events. Currently, existing steady-state analysis tools are ill-suited for simulating cascading outages as they do not model frequency dependencies, they require good initial conditions to converge, and they are unable to distinguish between a collapsed grid state from a hard-to-solve test case. In this paper, we extend a circuit-theoretic approach for simulating the steady-state of a power grid to incorporate frequency deviations and implicit models for underfrequency and undervoltage load shedding. Using these models, we introduce a framework capable of robustly solving cascading outages of large-scale systems that can also locate infeasible regions. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by simulating entire cascading outages on more than 8000 nodes sample testcase.