Prevention of cascading outages using sparse wide area synchrophasor measurements

Early prediction of cascade events outages followed by immediate and proper control actions can prevent major blackouts. This paper introduces a novel method to predict cascade event outage at early stage and mitigate it with proper control strategy. In the first step, methodology employs sparsely located phasor measurement units to detect disturbances using electromechanical oscillation propagation phenomena. The obtained information is used to update system topology and power flow. Next, a constrained spectral k-embedded clustering method is defined to determine possible cascade event scenarios, and if needed proper switching action is listed to intentionally create islands to minimize load shedding and maintain voltage profile of each island. The method was developed in MATLAB and tested with IEEE 118 bus test system. The results demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.