High Performance Computing for Operations and Transmission Planning at CAISO

The need for computation power for power system simulations is constantly increasing. Increasingly stringent reliability standards, policy initiatives and increased uncertainty are some of the contributing factors for the increased demand in computational power. Major offline and online power flow simulation tools now provide capabilities to users to implement parallel processing capability by utilizing multiple cores of modern computers. Various power system simulation software used at California Independent System Operator (CAISO) to perform steady state power flow simulations, contingency and stability analysis for offline and online applications include batch processing capability along with capability to use multiple cores on servers for parallel processing of different scenarios. This paper describes the utilization of parallel processing in Operations and Transmission Planning at CAISO for improving efficiency of offline and online runtimes and post-processing.