Controlled Islanding Based on the Coherency of Generators and Minimum Electrical Distance

Abstract

Inter-area oscillations and cascading failures are the most serious threats to the security of the electric power system. Uncontrolled islanding will occur in the event of an unstable inter-area oscillation or a progressive cascading failure. The establishment of uncontrolled islands with a deficiency in load-generation balance is the main reason for system blackout. Controlled islanding has been proposed as a preventive strategy for reducing the risk of blackout in this regard. A new algorithm for applying the controlled islanding strategy is proposed in this paper, based on load coherency and nearest electrical distances between coherent groups of generators. Coherent generators as the main core for controlled islands are identified in this method, which is based on the correlation coefficients between generators and the DBSCAN clustering algorithm. The sub-networks are then created by applying mixed-integer linear programming to each coherent group. Once this is accomplished, non-linear programming is used to construct the stable sub-networks associated with islands that meet the requirements of load-generation balance, voltage limitations, and transmission limits. The proposed scheme is implemented on the small-scale IEEE 39-bus system and a large-scale realistic power system which is the Iran power grid. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of being implemented in a real power system.

Keywords

• Intentional islanding
• generator coherency
• electrical distances
• DBSCAN algorithm
• Dijkstra algorithm
• non-linear programming