Intentional Controlled Islanding and Risk Assessment: A Unified Framework

Abstract

Power systems are prone to cascading outages leading to large-area blackouts, and intentional controlled islanding (ICI) can mitigate these catastrophic events by splitting the system into sustainable islands. ICI schemes are used as the last resort to prevent cascading events; thus, it is critical to evaluate the corresponding system risks to ensure their correct operation. This paper proposes a unified framework to assess the risk of ICI schemes. First, a novel ICI method to create islands with minimum power imbalance is presented. Further, a risk assessment methodology is used to assess the probability and impact of the main operational modes of the ICI scheme. The unified framework provides insights on the benefits of implementing ICI, considering the uncertainties related to its reliability. The ICI scheme is demonstrated using the IEEE 9-bus system. The proposed unified framework is then fully deployed on the actual power system of Cyprus. Multiple case studies on the real network are created to demonstrate the adaptability and robustness of the proposed scheme to different system conditions. The adoption of the unified framework highlights that the system risk significantly reduces with the ICI in service, even when the reliability uncertainties associated with the scheme are considered.