Resilience Analysis and Cascading Failure Modeling of Power Systems Under Extreme Temperatures

In this paper, we propose an AC power flow based cascading failure model that explicitly considers external weather conditions, extreme temperatures in particular, and evaluates the impact of extreme temperature on the initiation and propagation of cascading blackouts. Based on this model, resilience analysis of the power system is performed with extreme temperatures. Specifically, the changes of load and dynamic line rating are modeled due to temperature disturbance. The probabilities for transmission line and generator outages are evaluated, and the timing for each type of events is calculated to decide the actual event sequence. It should be emphasized that the correlated events, in the advent of external temperature changes, could contribute to voltage instability. Besides, we model undervoltage load shedding and operator re-dispatch as control strategies for preventing the propagation of cascading failures. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified by simulation results on the RTS-96 3-area system. It is found that temperature disturbances can lead to correlated load change and line/generator tripping, which will greatly increase the risk of cascading and voltage instability. Critical temperature change, critical area with temperature disturbance, the identification of most vulnerable buses, and the comparison of different control strategies are also investigated.