Placement of Synchronized Measurements for Power System Observability during Cascaded Outages

Cascaded outages often result in power system islanding followed by a blackout and therefore considered as a severe disturbance. Maintaining the observability of each island may help in taking proper control actions to preserve the stability of individual islands thus, averting system collapse. With this intent, a strategy for placement of synchronized measurements, which can be obtained from phasor measurement units (PMU), has been proposed in this paper to keep the system observable during cascaded outages also. Since, all the cascaded failures may not lead to islanding situations, therefore, failures leading to islanding as well as non-islanding situations have been considered. A topology based algorithm has been developed to identify the islanding/non-islanding condition created by a particular cascaded event. Additional contingencies such as single line loss and single PMU failure have also been considered after the occurrence of cascaded events. The proposed method is further extended to incorporate the measurement redundancy, which is desirable for a reliable state estimation. The proposed scheme is tested on IEEE 14-bus, IEEE 30-bus and a practical Indian 246-bus networks. The numerical results ensure the observability of the power system under system intact as well as during cascaded islanding and non-islanding disturbances.

Prevention of Cascaded Events of Distance Relay Zone Three Using Logic Controls

This paper presents a new method to prevent cascaded events caused by zone 3 elements of distance relays due to transmission line overload by using logic controls. A proposed adaptive distance relay algorithm provides a new concept to distinguish between actual faults and flow transfers and secures time to perform remedial controls by a defense system during cascaded events. Maloperation of distance relay is a very critical situation, leading to more operation of other distance relays and finally partial or total blackout. Logic controls are used to insure the operating decision through observing the system parameters and compare it with a setting already being input to the system. When distance relay is activated and the logic controls find that the system is healthy (unfaulted) and that the activation resulted from transmission line overload not real fault, the operation signal will be blocked to protect the system from maloperation.