Simulation of Cascade Contingencies in Power Systems

It is well known that power system blackouts generally involve the contingency of many components, stated as a catastrophic contingency; such as cascade failures. The cascade events are infrequently present in the system. However, its occurrence can provoke serious consequences for the security of the system. The post-mortem analyses of several blackouts have shown that cascade phenomena are involved in the blackout process. So, it is important to model these phenomena in several reliability and security studies of power systems, especially for planning the power system operation. This paper proposes a probabilistic model based on Monte Carlo simulations, in order to study the cascade phenomena. For instance, this model can be used to compute the power system security on a daily basis. The proposed model includes the different characteristics involved in the cascade phenomena, such as: the probabilistic occurrence of hidden failures in the operation of protection equipment, misoperation failures or unnecessary operation of backup protection equipment that provokes the outage of additional network branches, and the outage of overloaded branches, taking into account the operator reaction.