Optimal Design and Cascading Failure Evaluation of Remedial Action Schemes

Remedial action schemes (RAS) are often seen as an alternative to building new transmission infrastructure to relieve congestion in the system. Consequently, there has been a rapid growth in the number of RAS in electric power systems across the world. However, most RAS rely on fixed parameters and hence cannot adapt to the rapidly evolving nature of the electric grid. In this paper, an optimization framework (RAS-SCOPF) to automate the RAS design procedure is proposed. The proposed framework is a mixed integer quadratic program (MIQP) that chooses a set of optimal RAS actions and minimizes load shed when a contingency occurs. The cost of operation of the RAS-SCOPF is compared against those of standard Optimal Power Flow (OPF) and the Security-Constrained OPF (SCOPF) formulations. Moreover, the risk of cascading failure for the different formulations are evaluated using a DC power flow based cascading failure simulator (CFS). The proposed framework is applied to the RTS-96 24-bus network. The inclusion of RAS allows the system to be operated at a lower cost while preventing any contingency from evolving into cascading blackouts.