This paper summarizes the report prepared by an IEEE PES Task Force. Resilience is a fairly new technical concept for power systems, and it is important to precisely delineate this concept for actual applications. As a critical infrastructure, power systems have to be prepared to survive rare but extreme incidents (natural catastrophes, extreme weather events, physical/cyber-attacks, equipment failure cascades, etc.) to guarantee power supply to the electricity-dependent economy and society. Thus, resilience needs to be integrated into planning and operational assessment to design and operate adequately resilient power systems. Quantification of resilience as a key performance indicator is important, together with costs and reliability. Quantification can analyze existing power systems and identify resilience improvements in future power systems. Given that a 100% resilient system is not economic (or even technically achievable), the degree of resilience should be transparent and comprehensible. Several gaps are identified to indicate further needs for research and development.
One of the most critical risks for modern societies is a largescale power system blackout. Critical infrastructure has emergency power supplies (e.g., nuclear power plants, hospitals, or communication infrastructure) to confront power outage situations. However, after about 8 h of a blackout, fuel supplies and battery capacities normally run out. Thus, it is of utmost importance to restore the power system as robustly and quickly as possible. This responsibility lies with the transmission system operators (TS Os), and it is in their best interest to rapidly accomplish it.
1 January 2018 in International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems
The electric power demand after an outage can be significantly different from normal values. A major cause of this is the loss of statistic diversity in load devices that interact with some kind of storage. Examples are heating and cooling appliances as well as some applications of pumps and devices with integrated batteries. This phenomenon is known as cold load pickup (CLPU). Changes in load after an outage are of high relevance for investigations of power system restoration, especially active power control and balancing of generation and load. Besides the very fast inrush effects relevant for fast acting protection and short‐term stability, long‐term dynamics, thermal overload of equipment and active power balancing in the presence of uncontrolled distributed generation consider a time frame of minutes to hours. To predict CLPU from physical models, a lot of knowledge is required. Since this information is rarely available in the real‐world applications, the authors investigate typical ranges of CLPU behaviour. The authors analyse measurement data from reconnections after real outages of medium voltage feeders in Germany and provide parameters for the exponential decay model of CLPU. The relevance of the application of the presented model for long‐term stability studies is demonstrated by an example.
In this research paper, an adaptive and intelligent protection scheme is developed that brings selectivity and sensitivity to the conventional overcurrent relays considering the changes in grid topologies, changes in grid operation modes, and changes in short-circuit behavior due to the contributions from distributed energy resources in the medium-voltage distribution grids. A quasi-static medium-voltage benchmark grid model is used in the Python-based power system tool pandapower. Definite-time overcurrent relay devices are extended with a communication signal-based tripping scheme suitable for a decentralized communication architecture. Current phasor angles are compared between two primary relays and the result is fed into a tripping logic to achieve selectivity of the primary protection. Furthermore, communication between the primary and backup relays is established, extending the communication signal-based tripping scheme. It analyzes in which cases the proposed communication-based protection scheme’s ability to isolate the faulty section after short-circuit events is comparable to conventional schemes based on distance relays that require additional voltage measurements or differential relays that require dedicated high-speed communication. Therefore, the pre-existing and installed communication capabilities can be used to avoid the need for additional measurement hardware or communication technology.