Blackout

About: Blackout is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2088 publications have been published within this topic receiving 30433 citations.

Communication blackouts in power outages: Findings from scenario exercises in Germany and France

Abstract: Although infrequent, power outages can cause major disruption and incur huge costs. The increasing demand for electricity, more extreme weather events and the possibility of cyber-attack are increasing the risk of blackouts. This paper reports using scenario planning and role-playing exercises with German and French university students to investigate people's possible reactions and their expectations of government during a hypothetical 3-day blackout. The scenario is designed to explore how society would cope with a power failure over successive time periods. The aim is provide information to emergency managers and policy makers about community needs and people's likely behavior in future blackouts.

Load prioritization technique to guarantee the continuous electric supply for essential loads in rural microgrids

Abstract: Microgrid (MG) is one of the practical and best concepts to provide energy access to rural communities, where electric grid extension is not techno-economically feasible. Since the trend of load consumption is not uniform with a low load factor in a rural area, the required rating of the system becomes very high. Similarly, the generation is fixed for these MGs, whereas the load increases continuously over time. Such a system faces supply deficit issues triggering a high number of interruptions that may cause frequent blackouts. Hence, rolling blackout and load clipping techniques are preferred during the peak load period in most of the rural MGs. These issues lead to an unreliable power supply and low satisfaction level of the user. This paper presents the load prioritization technique to guarantee the continuous supply for the essential loads within the rural community. A day-ahead energy allocation technique is mathematically formulated and optimized to maximize the total hours of energy served. This technique maximized the hours of energy served to the load with higher priority followed by the load with lower priorities. From this study, it is found that the proposed strategy helps to improve the hours of energy served in the overall system, by improving the state of charge (SoC) level of the battery system. The result shows that the user satisfaction level has been improved by 5% through 100% of continuity for the essential loads.

Study on Wide Area Backup Protection to Prevent Cascading Trips Caused by Flow Transferring

Abstract: Protective relays, pivotal devices that can quickly identify and isolate fault area in power systems, is of great importance for power network security and reliability. When relays trip a faulted line in the network, the flow on the faulted line will be transferred to the other lines. Those lines might be overloaded and then cascading tripped by the backup relays, which worsen the system state and even cause blackout. Studies on several well-known blackouts reveal that protective relays are involved and the most troublesome ones are backup protective relays. In this paper the defects of the existing backup protections are investigated in detail first. Then a new wide area backup protection scheme based on WAMS to identify flow transferring is presented. A new concept of flow transferring relativity factor (FTRF) is proposed to estimate the flow distribution after flow transferring occurs; and the method of calculating FTRF matrix on-line is also stated. The simulation of a three machines network shows that the wide-area backup protection scheme to identify flow transferring works well

Preparing for disaster: recommendations based on the blackout of '03.

Abstract: Based on the experience of hoteliers caught in the blackout of '03, this checklist will help managers plan for power interruptions due to either man-made or natural causes. An organized approach to disaster planning provides a guide for maintaining guest service and for supporting the staff members who will provide that service in difficult circumstances. The checklist will help managers analyze the most likely problems caused by a protracted power outage and outlines preparations to address those problems.

Multi-Stage Dynamic Transmission Network Expansion Planning Using LSHADE-SPACMA

Abstract: This paper introduces a multi-stage dynamic transmission network expansion planning (MSDTNEP) model considering the N-1 reliability constraint. The integrated planning problem of N-1 security and transmission expansion planning is essential because a single line outage could be a triggering event to rolling blackouts. Two suggested scenarios were developed to obtain the optimal configuration of the Egyptian West Delta Network’s realistic transmission (WDN) to meet the demand of the potential load growth and ensure the system reliability up to the year 2040. The size of a blackout, based on the amount of expected energy not supplied, was calculated to evaluate both scenarios. The load forecasting (up to 2040) was obtained based on an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system because it gives excellent results compared to conventional methods. The linear population size reduction—Success-History-based Differential Evolution with semi-parameter adaptation (LSHADE-SPA) hybrid—covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) algorithm (LSHADE-SPACMA)—is applied to solve the problem. The semi-adaptive nature of LSHADE-SPACMA and the hybridization between LSHADE and CMA-ES are able to solve complex optimization problems. The performance of LSHADE-SPACMA in solving the problem is compared to other well-established methods using three testing systems to validate its superiority. Then, the MSDTNEP of the Egyptian West Delta Network is presented, and the numerical results of the two scenarios are compared to obtain an economic plan and avoid a partial or total blackout.