Blackout

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

Basic Research Needs for Superconductivity. Report of the Basic Energy Sciences Workshop on Superconductivity, May 8-11, 2006

Abstract: As an energy carrier, electricity has no rival with regard to its environmental cleanliness, flexibility in interfacing with multiple production sources and end uses, and efficiency of delivery. In fact, the electric power grid was named ?the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century? by the National Academy of Engineering. This grid, a technological marvel ingeniously knitted together from local networks growing out from cities and rural centers, may be the biggest and most complex artificial system ever built. However, the growing demand for electricity will soon challenge the grid beyond its capability, compromising its reliability through voltage fluctuations that crash digital electronics, brownouts that disable industrial processes and harm electrical equipment, and power failures like the North American blackout in 2003 and subsequent blackouts in London, Scandinavia, and Italy in the same year. The North American blackout affected 50 million people and caused approximately $6 billion in economic damage over the four days of its duration. Superconductivity offers powerful new opportunities for restoring the reliability of the power grid and increasing its capacity and efficiency. Superconductors are capable of carrying current without loss, making the parts of the grid they replace dramatically more efficient. Superconducting wires carry up tomore » five times the current carried by copper wires that have the same cross section, thereby providing ample capacity for future expansion while requiring no increase in the number of overhead access lines or underground conduits. Their use is especially attractive in urban areas, where replacing copper with superconductors in power-saturated underground conduits avoids expensive new underground construction. Superconducting transformers cut the volume, weight, and losses of conventional transformers by a factor of two and do not require the contaminating and flammable transformer oils that violate urban safety codes. Unlike traditional grid technology, superconducting fault current limiters are smart. They increase their resistance abruptly in response to overcurrents from faults in the system, thus limiting the overcurrents and protecting the grid from damage. They react fast in both triggering and automatically resetting after the overload is cleared, providing a new, self-healing feature that enhances grid reliability. Superconducting reactive power regulators further enhance reliability by instantaneously adjusting reactive power for maximum efficiency and stability in a compact and economic package that is easily sited in urban grids. Not only do superconducting motors and generators cut losses, weight, and volume by a factor of two, but they are also much more tolerant of voltage sag, frequency instabilities, and reactive power fluctuations than their conventional counterparts. The challenge facing the electricity grid to provide abundant, reliable power will soon grow to crisis proportions. Continuing urbanization remains the dominant historic demographic trend in the United States and in the world. By 2030, nearly 90% of the U.S. population will reside in cities and suburbs, where increasingly strict permitting requirements preclude bringing in additional overhead access lines, underground cables are saturated, and growth in power demand is highest. The power grid has never faced a challenge so great or so critical to our future productivity, economic growth, and quality of life. Incremental advances in existing grid technology are not capable of solving the urban power bottleneck. Revolutionary new solutions are needed ? the kind that come only from superconductivity.« less

Preventing Cascading Failure Through Fuzzy Co-Operative Control Mechanism Using V2G

Abstract: The previously proposed algorithms for preventing cascading failures, which lead to a blackout event, involve specific load shedding schemes, which introduce incurring losses in the power system network. In this paper, a cooperative control based algorithm using a vehicle to grid (V2G) technology based on a fuzzy logic approach is proposed to prevent cascading failures without loss incurrence. The algorithm is implemented on a standard IEEE-30 bus system, and it uses mathematical combinations heuristically to identify the critical nodes through the use of a self-propagation graph to dispatch the optimum power from V2G. For the enhancement of computational speed, a network operator considers only those vulnerable nodes, which are identified by a self-propagating graph. Through this, a network operator can easily detect critical nodes by rooting straight to the vulnerable transmission lines in the IEEE-30 bus network. The probabilistic modeling in this paper is performed in such a way that network operators will mitigate cascading failures events (CFEs) after the occurrence of (N -1) and (N -1-1) contingencies/blackout events without performing load shedding. The detailed experimental analysis provides better visualization of the impact of CFEs on power grids to the power network operators and therefore significantly improves the accuracy of taking necessary actions to compensate these CFEs.

Decision tree analysis to identify harmful contingencies and estimate blackout indices for predicting system vulnerability

Abstract: Cascading failure is the main mechanism for progressing large blackouts in power systems. Following an initial event, it is challenging to predict whether there is a potential for starting cascading failure. In fact, the potential of an event for starting a cascading failure depends on many factors such as network structure, system operating point and nature of the event. In this paper, based on the application of decision tree, a new approach is proposed for identifying harmful line outages with the potential of starting and propagating cascading failures. For this purpose, associated with each trajectory of the cascading failure, a blackout index is defined that determines the potential of the initial event for triggering cascading failures towards power system blackout. In order to estimate the blackout indices associated with a line outage, a three stages harmful estimator decision tree (HEDT) is proposed. The proposed HEDT works based on the online operating data provided by a wide area monitoring system (WAMS). The New England 39-bus test system is utilized to show the worthiness of the proposed algorithm.