Power System Recovery Strategy After a Major Blackout

Abstract A plethora of factors have been identified as contributing to the current deficit in energy production and supply. These include power outages, transmission line overloads, discrepancies between energy production and demand, errors in load forecasting, meteorological phenomena, maintenance issues, cyber-attacks, and terrorist or criminal acts. The unpredictability in the production of renewable energy sources, aggravating the problem of consistently matching supply to demand in electricity grids. This article considers the possibility of a power outage over a large area of the interconnected electricity transmission system. It also presents how to prevent such a possibility, as well as the remedial actions to follow to prevent a catastrophic event such as a power outage. The safety criteria of the transmission system, the defense plans and the remedial actions that the system operator should prepare to prevent a major power outage are described. First, the major power outages that have occurred in recent years are presented and their causes are examined. In addition, it has been tried to find similarities between the past power cuts in Turkey and the state of the European electricity grid. A transmission failure simulation test environment has been developed to understand the characteristics of realistic transmission level disturbances propagated to the power system and the effects of such disturbances on the performance of conventional conservation and restoration technologies. By using both Black Start units and connection lines from neighboring system operators, it was ensured that restoration time was minimized by creating separate islands that would eventually be synchronized. In the study, a restoration strategy was presented. The proposed strategy has been tested and validated in the IEEE-39 bus system. The results proved the efficiency of the restoration strategy, as the total restoration time was sufficiently short depending on the complexity of each system, and critical loads were primarily fed.