Extreme Outages Research Articles

Transactive Energy Rationing in Islanded Electric Power Systems

Extreme weather events, many of which are climate-change related, are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity and causing catastrophic outages. One of the major modern-day concerns of utilities is dealing with such extreme outages and consequently, its repercussions on the lives of people in society and social aspects. Traditionally, operators have been using rolling blackouts as a contingency plan to serve critical loads during such events when electricity supply is scarce. However, such blackouts practices are executed on a last-minute mandatory basis, depriving customers having low-capacity high-priority loads (i.e. refrigeration, water, telecommunication, etc) that should also be serviced if at all possible. Historically, policymakers have often adopted quota-based regulatory actions or rationing for other commodities (such as gasoline, butter, sugar) to handle scarcity situations. Motivated from such quota-based systems, our contribution presented in this work is an alternative transactive rationing mechanism that would provide some minimum level of service to all of the customers and serve the critical loads using market-based control during such scarcity-based contingencies. This is in contrast to the state-of-art TE mechanisms that allocate resources to customers solely based on their willingness-to-pay. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is demonstrated through simulation-based evaluation on two real-life use cases having feeder-level and microgrid-level configurations respectively. Simulation results clearly demonstrate the capability of the rationing scheme to serve customers' high-priority loads through prolonged outages even during extreme scarcity scenarios.

Observed Acceleration of Cascading Outages

Accounts of extreme power outages of transmission systems suggest the acceleration of cascading outage propagation over time and the splitting of the cascade into a slow phase and a subsequent fast phase. This is significant to network operators, as mitigation actions, such as load shedding, can only be effectively applied during the slow phase. During the fast phase, the network disintegrates too quickly for any manual intervention. To supplement the accounts of extreme outages, we describe the observed acceleration of smaller and more common cascading outages by analyzing transmission outage data published by one North American utility. Our results show that these common cascades accelerate much less than the extreme cascades. This justifies ongoing research in mitigation strategies.

Fast Frequency Response From Utility-Scale Hydrogen Electrolyzers

This paper introduces the modelling foundations to study the fast frequency response (FFR) from utility-scale hydrogen electrolyzers (HEs). Specifically, we propose a dynamic model of the HE electrolysis stack, power-electronics interface, and downstream hydrogen process operational constraints, which is suitable for system-level frequency dynamics studies. We then model and study HE FFR dependency on pre-contingency operating point, size, converter's overloading capability, network location, and active power-frequency controller. Different case studies are run on the Australian multi-area test system via dynamic simulations of a 2030 scenario with 50% renewables and in the context of the August 2018 separation event. Our modelling and results illustrate how grid-scale HEs could support a more secure and resilient operation of low-carbon systems for both credible and extreme outages and the role of different design setups and operating conditions and constraints.

PMD-Induced Fluctuations of Bit-Error Rate in Optical Fiber Systems

This paper presents a method that allows evaluating the performance of an optical fiber system where bit errors result from a complex interplay of spontaneous noise generated in optical amplifiers and birefringent disorder of the transmission fiber. We demonstrate that in the presence of temporal fluctuations of birefringence characteristics, the bit-error rate (BER) itself is insufficient for characterizing system performance. Adequate characterization requires introducing the probability distribution function (PDF) of the BER obtained by averaging over many realizations of birefringent disorder. Our theoretical analysis shows that this PDF has an extended tail indicating the importance of anomalously large values of BER. We present the results of comprehensive analysis of the following issues: 1) The dependence of the PDF tail shape on detection details, such as filtering and regular temporal shift adjustment; 2) the changes in the PDF of BER that occur when the first- or higher order polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensation techniques are applied; 3) an alternative PMD compensation method capable of providing more efficient suppression of extreme outages.

Extreme outages caused by polarization mode dispersion.

We study the dependence on fiber birefringence of the bit-error rate (BER) caused by amplifier noise in a linear optical fiber telecommunication system. We show that the probability-distribution function of the BER obtained by averaging over many realizations of birefringent disorder has an extended tail that corresponds to anomalously large values of BER. We specifically discuss the dependence of the tail on such details of pulse detection at the fiber output as setting the clock and filtering procedures.

Periodic and quasi-periodic compensation strategies of extreme outages caused by polarization mode dispersion and amplifier noise

Effect of birefringent disorder on the Bit Error Rate (BER) in an optical fiber telecommunication system subject to amplifier noise may lead to extreme outages, related to anomalously large values of BER. We analyze the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) of BER for various strategies of Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) compensation. A compensation method is proposed that is capable of more efficient extreme outages suppression, which leads to substantial improvement of the fiber system performance.

Compensation for extreme outages caused by polarization mode dispersion and amplifier noise

Fluctuations of Bit-Error-Rate (BER) stimulated by birefringent disorder in an optical fiber system are found to be strong. The effect may not be analyzed in terms of the average BER but rather requires analyzing the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) of BER. We report the emergence of the extremely extended algebraic-like tail of the PDF, corresponding to anomalously large values of BER. We analyze the dependence of the PDF tail, and thus the outage probability, on the first-order PMD compensation scheme. Effectiveness of compensation is illustrated quantitatively using a simple, however, practical example.