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ECE PhD Dissertation Defense: Ahmet Oner
April 19, 2021 @ 9:00 am - 10:00 am
PhD Dissertation Defense: Improving the Resilience of the Power Grid
Ahmet Oner
Location: Teams Meeting
Abstract: The power grid constitutes one of the most critical infrastructures that have significant interdependencies with various others such as communication, transportation, emergency, and health-care delivery systems. A disruption in the operation of the power grid may affect the operation of all others in an undesirable manner. Therefore, improving the resiliency of power grids can also help increase the resiliency of other critical infrastructures. This dissertation presents methods to improve the resiliency of power grids against extreme events and/or system changes.
First, generation dispatch, adaptable load shedding strategy, and pro-active line switching are combined in order to maximize the resiliency of the overall power grid against extreme events. The moving event is monitored, and the control actions are adjusted accordingly to improve the resilience under changing conditions affected by the natural disaster during its active period. Then, that study is further extended and made it robust against voltage instability. The details of the methodology and its implementation are presented.
To reduce the probability of voltage problems and line flow limit violations, and to improve power quality, distributed generators (DG) are placed strategically ahead of the event using outage forecasts based on historical outage data. Therefore, a possible set of outage scenarios is considered, and a minimum number of required DG placements are determined to maintain system feasibility for all considered scenarios.
Lastly, reactive power sources are placed to solve the voltage instability problems, which are caused by the lack of reactive power in the system. The computational burden of optimal placement problem presents a practical limitation for applying it to very large scale systems considering multi-contingency cases. This part presents a practical and easily implementable solution that will address this limitation.