Model reduction for a power grid model

Abstract

We apply model reduction techniques to the DeMarco power grid model. The DeMarco model, when augmented by an appropriate line failure mechanism, can be used to study cascade failures. Here we examine the DeMarco model without the line failure mechanism and we investigate how to construct reduced order models for subsets of the state variables. We show that due to the oscillating nature of the solutions and the absence of timescale separation between resolved and unresolved variables, the construction of accurate reduced models becomes highly non-trivial since one has to account for long memory effects. In addition, we show that a reduced model which includes even a short memory is drastically better than a memoryless model.