Lecture: May 8, 2012

www.stanford.edu/class/ee392n


Prevention and Mitigation of Cascading Outages in Power Grids Using Synchrophasor-based Wide-Area Measurements

Kai Sun, EPRI

Bio

Dr. Kai Sun is a project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in the areas of grid operations, planning and renewable integration. His current research activities focus on the application of synchrophasors in power system monitoring and control, prevention and mitigation of cascading outages, intelligent system separation and restoration, and application of advanced intelligence technologies.

Prior to joining EPRI in 2007, Dr. Sun was a research associate at Arizona State University in Tempe. Earlier, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario.

Kai Sun received a Bachelor’s Degree in automation in 1999 and a Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering in 2004 from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Abstract

Since the Northeast Blackout in 1965, US electricity utilities have made many efforts to enhance the reliability of power grids, but cascading outages continued to happen followed by catastrophic blackouts. At present, the rapid growth of regional electricity markets and the increasing integration of intermittent resources (e.g. renewable generation and demand response) at a time without corresponding growth in transmission infrastructure will stress power grids, bring many uncertainties to grid operations and, as a result, increase the probability of cascading outages. Therefore, it is more critical to develop online situational awareness and self-healing techniques for power grids to prevent or mitigate cascading outages against a blackout. Electricity utilities are building synchrophasor-based wide-area measurement systems, which offer GPS-synchronized real-time phasor measurements authentically presenting the dynamics of a power grid. This presentation will talk about how synchrophasors may help addressing key problems regarding prevention and mitigation of cascading outages. The speaker will also introduce ongoing EPRI projects on developing and field-demonstrating software tools for online situational awareness and decision support at control rooms of power grids.

Lecture Notes

Prevention and Mitigation of Cascading Outages in Power Grids Using Synchrophasor-based Wide-Area Measurements (pdf)