Cascading Failures Assessment in Renewable Integrated Power Grids Under Multiple Faults Contingencies

Abstract

Cascading overload failures occurred in power systems due to higher penetration of renewable energy resources (RERs), which causes uncertainty in a grid. To overcome these cascading overload failures, proper assessment in the form of load flow balancing and transients stability is required in renewable integrated power grids (RIPGs). This problem becomes more critical in the occurrence of multiple intervals faults in multiple interconnected RIPGs, which causes the tripping of several RERs. Due to which outages occurred in various transmission lines, which lead the power system to cascading overload failures. To tackle this problem, hybrid probabilistic modeling is proposed in this paper for balancing load flow and an assessment of transients stability in multiple interconnected RIPGs. For balancing of load flow, a smart node transmission network topology is utilized along with integrating a unified power flow controller (UPFC), while transients instabilities are assessed through a UPFC alone. Contrary to the previously proposed algorithms, which are only suitable to compensate network instabilities in case of only a single interval fault, this work is supported by probabilistic modeling to compensate network instabilities under the occurrence of not only a single interval fault but also in case of more severe multiple intervals faults in multiple interconnected RIPGs that will lead the network to cascading failure outages. Simulation results verify that our proposed probabilistic algorithm achieved near an optimal performance by outperforming the existing proposed methodologies, which are only confined to mitigate the effect of network instabilities only in case of single interval fault and fails to address these network instabilities under the occurrence of severe multiple interval faults, which leads the network to cascading failure outages. These simulation results are also validated through an industrial case study performed on a western Denmark transmission network to show the superiority of our proposed algorithm.