Modeling and mitigation of Geomagnetically Induced Currents on a realistic power system network

This paper utilizes a novel technique developed to correlate the magnitude of Geomagnetically Induced Current (GIC) with the reactive power absorbed by the transformer´s magnetizing reactance to model the impacts of GIC in load flow studies. A portion of an actual 500 kV power system segment is modeled and the impacts of a GIC event are considered on the voltage profile of the segment. Different what-if scenarios are considered and a potential operational mitigation strategy is proposed. It is shown that an improved visibility of GIC within the network can help the system operator take more informed and effective measures to protect the system during GIC events.