Contingency Analysis
Contingency Analysis
Another idea to enter the field of security analysis in power systems is that an outage only has a
limited geographical effect. The loss of a transmission line does not cause much effect a thousand miles
away; in fact, we might hope that it doesn't cause much trouble beyond 20 miles from the outage,
although if the line were a heavily loaded, high-voltage line, its loss will most likely be felt more than 20
miles away
To realize any benefit from the limited geographical effect of an outage, the power system must
be divided into two parts: the affected part and the part that is unaffected. To make this division, the
buses at the end of the outaged line are marked as layer zero. The buses that are one transmission line or
transformer from layer zero are then labeled layer one. This same process can be carried out, layer by
layer, until all the buses in the entire network are included. Some arbitrary number of layers is chosen and
all buses included in that layer and lower-numbered layers are solved as a power flow with the outage in
place. The buses in the higher-numbered layers are kept as constant voltage and phase angle (i.e., as
reference buses).
This procedure can be used in two ways: either the solution of the layers included becomes the
final solution of that case and all overloads and voltage violations are determined from this power flow,
or the solution simply is used to form a performance index for that outage. Figure 11.11 illustrates this
layering procedure.
The concentric relaxation procedure was originally proposed by Zaborsky (see reference 13). The
trouble with the concentric relaxation technique is that it requires more layers for circuits whose influence
is felt further from the outage.
Bounding
A paper by Brandwajn (reference 11) solves at least one of the problems in using the concentric
relaxation method. Namely, it uses an adjustable region around the outage to solve for the outage case
overloads. In reference 11, this is applied only to the linear (DC) power flow; it has subsequently been
extended for AC network analysis.
To perform the analysis in the bounding technique we define three subsystems of the power
system as follows:
N1=the subsystem immediately surrounding the outaged line
N2=the external subsystem that we shall not solve in detail
N3=the set of boundary buses that separate N1 and N2
The subsystems appear as shown in Figure 11.12. The bounding method is based on the fact that
we can make certain assumptions about the phase angle spread across the lines in N2, given the injections
in N1 and the maximum phase angle appearing across any two buses in N3. In Appendix 11A of this
chapter we show how to calculate the APk and the AP,,, injections that will make the phase angles on
buses k and rn simulate the outage of line k-m.
If we are given maximum amount a transmission line in N2 with flow f:q, then there is a that the
flow on pq can shift. That is, it can increase from