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Caltech

CMX Lunch Seminar

Wednesday, October 23, 2019
12:00pm to 1:00pm
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Annenberg 213
Mitigation of Cascading Failures in Power Systems
Steven H. Low, Gilloon Professor, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Caltech,

Line failure in power grid propgates in non-local, intricate and counterintuitive ways because of the interplay between power flow physics and network topology, making the mitigation of cascading failure difficult. The conventional approach to grid reliability is through building redundant lines. In this talk, we present an opposite approach to grid reliability through failure localization, by judiciously removing lines and adopting a new class of frequency control algorithms at real time. The topology design partitions the network into regions that are connected in a tree structure. The frequency control automatically adjusts controllable generators and loads to minimize disruption and localize failure propagation. This approach is derived from a spectral view of power flow equations that relates failure propagation to the graphical structure of the grid through its Laplacian matrix. We summarize the underlying theory and present simulation results that demonstrate that our approach not only localizes failure propagation, as promised by the theory, but also improves overall grid reliability even though it reduces line redundancy.

(Joint work with Daniel Guo, Chen Liang, Alessandro Zocca, and Adam Wierman)

For more information, please contact Jolene Brink by phone at (626)395-2813 or by email at [email protected] or visit CMX Website.