Long term transmission expansion planning to improve power system resilience against cascading outages

Abstract

A Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) problem is proposed to find the optimal configuration of the transmission network with considering security and resilience constraints. Due to the importance of blackouts and cascading failure, the proposed Resilient TEP (RTEP) minimizes the effects of cascading outages in term of load curtailment. In order to estimate the size of cascading outages, based on the total lost load, an iterative algorithm is proposed to analyze and simulate the steady state mechanism of cascading outages. A set of initiating events are defined as the triggering points of the cascading failure and the consequent chain of related outages are identified to determine the blackout size. In addition to the resilience constraints, the security constraints based on N-1 security criterion are also considered. Based on the Benders Decomposition (BD) algorithm, a multi-stage solution procedure is developed to handle the investment decisions, security constraints, and resilience requirements efficiently. In order to achieve the optimal resilient TEP configuration, all the master and sub-problems are formulated as Mixed Integer Programming optimization models. The proposed RTEP is implemented over the IEEE 24-bus test system.