Super components contingencies for severity analysis of power systems

Power system security requires the modeling and simulation of catastrophic contingencies that could be present in the system collapse or blackouts. Thus, power system operators require analysis tools that give them information in order to take preventive and corrective actions to operate the system in a reliable way. Generally, this type of analysis involves simple componentpsilas contingencies based on a N-1 criteria. However, it has been shown that more than one component of the system has been involved in major blackouts. These major contingencies include simultaneous outages, cascade phenomena or a major outage that means the outage of complete power system installation with several components, i.e. a Super Component contingency, such as a full substation. So, an outage of a super component implies the multiple and simultaneous outages of many elements. This paper presents a methodology to model and to evaluate the severity of this kind of contingencies in the operative planning framework. The methodology has been implemented in MATLAB and tested using the IEEE 118 and IEEE 300 systems.