Modeling, Simulation, and Prevention of July 23, 2018, Indonesia's Southeast Sumatra Power System Blackout

Abstract

Power systems across the globe suffer from blackouts at times, which tend to become recurrent phenomena. The incident is triggered by an initiating disturbance, which causes cascading events, leading to blackouts. Learning and analyzing blackouts in the real world can play a very important role in avoiding such events. In this paper, the experience of Indonesia's South Sumatra blackout on July 23, 2018 is studied and presented. The blackout is reproduced and simulated, then validated with actual data. The root cause of the blackout is analyzed. Finally, corrective actions such as PSS design with tuned parameters and transmission system operation in the meshed configuration are modeled and simulated, which yield satisfactory results in preventing similar blackouts in the future.