Dynamic probabilistic risk assessment of cascading outages

Abstract

Cascading outages in transmission power systems leading to blackouts or major power disruption are due to complex mechanisms. Some of the key mechanisms are intrinsically linked to power system dynamics that static models cannot represent. Additionally, stochastic failures of the protection devices are another important factor. Therefore, a dynamic probabilistic risk assessment of cascading outages is necessary. However, most of the existing approaches are based on static power system models. This paper discusses the limitation of these static models, reviews the state of the art on dynamic probabilistic risk assessment of cascading outages and proposes several techniques to solve the current challenges. Probabilistic dynamic simulations are compared to deterministic dynamic simulations using two test systems. The results show that probabilistic simulations show various impacts on the cascading risks for those two test systems.