Case study of an improved Cascading Outage Analysis model using outage checkers

Electric power grids throughout the world continue to suffer from massive blackouts with multibillion dollar cost to society. Most large blackouts involve a sequence of cascading outages. Once a critical component of a power system failed, the outages including generator and load trips can sequentially spread and frequently lead to large blackouts. Some of our previous work has proposed a sequential outage checker based cascading outage analysis model. In this paper, an improved cascading outage analysis model is proposed. Four outage checkers, namely the transient stability checker, the frequency outage checker, the line outage checker and the voltage outage checker are implemented. The outage checkers are operated according to a newly proposed algorithm to determine the status of the resulting operating state or equilibrium. Detailed modeling of the protection schemes, including rotor angle deviation relays, under frequency load shedding schemes, under/over voltage relays and over current relays are implemented. A case study of the improved cascading outage model using the IEEE 118-bus system and the IEEE 300-bus system is also presented.