Blackout

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

The Complexity of Design Networks: Structure and Dynamics

Abstract: Why was the $6 billion FAA air traffic control project scrapped? How could the 1977 New York City blackout occur? Why do large-scale engineering systems or technology projects fail? How do engineering changes and errors propagate, and how is that related to epidemics and earthquakes? In this chapter, we demonstrate how the emerging science of complex networks provides answers to these intriguing questions.

Use of a Helicon Source for Development of a Re-Entry Blackout Amelioration System.

Abstract: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

Analysis on Special Protection Scheme of Korea Electric Power System by Fully Utilizing STATCOM in a Generation Side

Abstract: Increase in power demand has required providing infrastructure, such as huge power plants and transmission lines. However, the recent trends in power system planning and operation are being toward maximum utilization of existing electricity infrastructure with tight operating margins because of new constraints placed by economic, political, and environmental issues. This might cause serious stability problems when a severe fault or a sudden outage of critical lines occurs. Therefore, the special protection scheme (SPS) has been used by generator tripping and successive load shedding to prevent a large-scale blackout by the cascading effect. If the number of tripping generators in the SPS operation is reduced, the enormous cost of power outage can be saved. This paper analyzes the enhancement of SPS via the transient stability improvement by the static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) applied to a generation side of Korea electric power system. First, its characteristic related to the SPS is described. Then, the proper capacity of STATCOM is determined with the equal area criterion to reduce the number of tripping generators. Also, the new control method for STATCOM is proposed for its full utilization. Finally, its effectiveness is verified by the case study with the practical data of Korea electric power system.

Analysis of Chain of Events in Major Historic Power Outages

Abstract: Contemporary power systems are facing increasing intricate conditions that have never been considered when initially designing the infrastructure, such as malicious threats, accommodating smart grids, etc. As a consequence, blackouts albeit seldom but stubbornly keep appearing from time to time the world around, and demonstrate their devastating capability to create vast damage on both power systems and the society at large. Patterns of the blackout starting from the first triggering events to the system final status have emerged. A framework of a coding system was proposed in this paper in order to capture the common feature in the system evolution during the development of cascades. Cascades in a blackout can be tracked by a chain of events with the help of the codes. It is facile to adopt the framework to build up a knowledge base of blackouts. By applying the proposed framework to 31 selected historic blackouts, most frequent events, effects and origins are identified; the findings can provide useful information for grid designers and security experts for ranking the most imminent issues in their study. © 2014 AECE.

A reinforcement learning approach for sequential decision-making process of attacks in smart grid

Abstract: An attacker can very possibly make significant damage for the power grid with a proper sequence of timing and attacks. Existing approaches neglect the power system generation loss and also identification of critical attack sequences. In this paper, we investigate a reinforcement learning approach to identify the minimum number of attacks/actions to reach blackout threshold. The attacker will only have limited topological information of the power systems. Proper state vectors, action vectors and also reward are designed in this smart grid security environment. The proposed method is evaluated on a W & W 6 bus system and an IEEE 30 bus system. The attack performance is tested for different percentages of line outage. The amount of load shedding is also considered as an attack objective and demonstrated on W & W 6 bus system. The optimal attack sequence is identified through a trial-and-error learning process and is then validated on a power system simulator.