How could advanced distribution automation have prevented the 2006 U.S. Northwest Queen blackout

Abstract

As the development of economic and society, the reliability of distribution system is more important than ever. Traditional distribution automation has developed a lot in order to cope with the evolution of smart distribution system and to meet the reliability and other requirements such as security, economical, efficiency and clean. In this article, we focus on the technology framework and functions of advanced distribution system and investigate on whether advanced distribution system is sufficient enough to prevent large scale black out. We review the procedures and outline the key factors that caused the blackout in Northwest Queen, which took place in 2006. Then we evaluate the functional performance of advanced distribution automation with the real case to check whether it is enough to prevent large scale blackout and enhance the reliability of distribution system. Based on the evaluation results, we discuss the key technologies as supplement for the advanced distribution automation to realize self-healing smart distribution system. The research in this article proposes a method to evaluate whether present practical self-healing system is adequate and sufficient enough to prevent large scale blackout and guarantee the security of distributed system. The observations in this article can be used to guide the real projects of advanced distribution automation and self-healing distribution system.