Estimating risk of cascading blackout using probabilistic methods

Evaluating the risk of blackouts could be helpful in power system design, operating and upgrades. Due to huge cost of blackouts, it is very important to estimate the risk of blackouts. In this paper a method has been proposed to assessing the risk of blackouts. In this way Monte Carlo simulation and Gaussian mixture method have been used to analyze the risk and estimate the probability density function of the blackout size, respectively. Cascading outages is a procedure that increases the probability of large blackouts. Therefore the effects of cascading outages should be considered as transmission equipments overloading and hidden failure of protection system. The presented method has been applied to IEEE 118 bus and the network of Khorasan Regional Electric Company. The effects of considering cascading outages and its results in different loading conditions on the risk of blackout have been investigated.