Evaluation of Risk of Cascading Outages due to Imperfect Manual Corrective Actions

Cascading outages are the leading cause of major disturbances and blackouts. During the slow phase, timely manual corrective actions (MCAs) can halt the cascade. However, perfect execution of MCAs cannot be guaranteed, especially under stressful conditions. Furthermore, recent blackouts and disturbances have highlighted a range of consequences resulting from improper MCAs. In this study, we enhance our previously developed Human Reliability Analysis-Optimal Power Flow (HRA-OPF) framework, which integrates the estimated failure probability of MCAs in the risk analysis of outage scenarios. We expand the framework by introducing additional operator failures scenarios, distinguishing between failures in diagnosis and action phases, and accounting for a broader spectrum of consequences. We apply the HRA-OPF framework to the New England Test System grid. Finally, we evaluate the sensitivity of the results to various assumptions, such as the nominal probability of operator failure and islanding possibilities.