Abstract
Space weather driven by solar activity can induce geomagnetic disturbances at the Earth's surface that can affect power transmission systems. Variations in the geomagnetic field result in geomagnetically induced currents that can enter the system through its grounding connections, saturate transformers and lead to system instability and possibly collapse. This study analyzes the impact of extreme space weather on the northern part of the European power transmission grid for different transformer designs to understand its vulnerability in case of an extreme event. The behavior of the system was analyzed in its operational mode during a severe geomagnetic storm, and mitigation measures, like line compensation, were also considered. These measures change the topology of the system, thus varying the path of geomagnetically induced currents and inducing a local imbalance in the voltage stability superimposed on the grid operational flow. Our analysis shows that the North European power transmission system is fairly robust against extreme space weather events. When considering transformers more vulnerable to geomagnetic storms, only few episodes of instability were found in correspondence with an existing voltage instability due to the underlying system load. The presence of mitigation measures limited the areas of the network in which bus voltage instabilities arise with respect to the system in which mitigation measures are absent.
Highlights
Space weather driven by solar activity can cause serious impacts on power transmission systems
Our analysis shows that the North European power transmission system is fairly robust against extreme space weather events
We present a study of the behavior of the North European power transmission grid with different transformer configurations subjected to an extreme space weather event
Summary
Space weather driven by solar activity can cause serious impacts on power transmission systems. As expressed by Faraday’s law of induction, perturbations of the geomagnetic field to the ground level induce a geoelectric field at the earth’s surface which, in turn, causes geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) (Bernabeu, 2013) to enter through the grounding connections of the high voltage transmission grids and flow throughout the system. This can lead to power grid instabilities and even grid collapse.
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