Development of a Viable Black Start Restoration Pathway and Problem Formulation Sequence

The robustness of the power grid, which is normally deigned to meet “N-1 or N-2” criteria, is constantly being threatened as a result of frequent weather-related extreme events. The impact of such events on any country’s economy can be massive and hence certain measures must be put in place to either prevent or reduce such impacts to its barest minimum. The resilience nature of some distributed energy resources (DERs) has further enhanced its viability in most power grid applications today. The integration of DERs into the power grid, especially at the distribution level, has greatly changed the dynamics of the modern electricity system. The role of DER in the provision of black start services is the focus of this paper. Since the emerging power grid must be safeguarded against all forms of instability, which is most likely to result in a system collapse leading to a power blackout, a critical review of some outstanding blackout events of the last decade was carried out. Armed with this knowledge, a restoration strategy capable of improving the resiliency of the grid in the unlikely events of a blackout is presented in this work. The uniqueness of the developed black start restoration sequence is the real time coordination of the restoration process by the advanced distribution management system. Besides this, a black start restoration (BSR) problem formulation method which can be applied in distribution management system is presented. The formulated BSR problem was done as a dynamic optimisation problem.