Multiple line outage detection for smart grid: A block-wise compressive sensing perspective

Abstract

Smart grids (SGs), which can fully detect and monitor electrical parameters and user behaviours, have become a development trend of power networks. With larger scale and access of new energy, SGs become more vulnerable and unstable. Under this circumstance, unexpected line outages may cause more harm in SGs than in traditional power grids. Thus, accurate and fast localization of line outages is one of the major tasks and challenges in SGs. By exploiting the sparsity of line outages and phase information from phase measurement units (PMUs), compressive sensing (CS) has been introduced into line outage detection recently. In this paper, we propose a novel block-wise CS based multiple line outage detection scheme for SGs. First, by utilizing the sparsity of line outages and connection relation of the power grid, a new reactance model is derived, making the block-wise CS applicable. Then, we modify the traditional CS algorithm by redefining the selection criterion. The proposed scheme can achieve better precision as well as less complexity compared to the conventional schemes.