A Procedure to Design Fault-Tolerant Wide-Area Damping Controllers

The idea of a smart grid is based on the increased integration of information technologies throughout the power grid. Technologies, such as phasor measurement units, are being deployed to increase the number of wide-area measurements across the bulk power system providing increased awareness of the system operational state. However, from a critical infrastructure perspective, the advanced metering infrastructure introduces a concern: the loss of communication among devices and the power grid. This communication loss may interfere with the wide-area control system performance and adversely affect the power system dynamics. This paper proposes a method based on genetic algorithms for wide-area robust damping controller design considering multiple operation points and loss of communication links related to the input and to the output of the central controller. The method is applied to enhance the damping of the electromechanical oscillations in an IEEE benchmark system: the simplified 14-generator model of the Southeastern Australian power system. The performance of the designed controller is evaluated using modal analysis and non-linear simulations in the time domain. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the method to design a single centralized controller that provides satisfactory damping to the electromechanical oscillations over several operating points, even when there is a loss of a communication link, thus being robust with respect to is an important aspect of a critical power grid infrastructure.