SBIR/STTR Phase I: Preventive, corrective, and emergency control for equipment outages producing voltage collapse and blackout

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an autonomous method for curing voltage collapse and blackout in a power system that may occur when a loadflow has no solution. This method will identify over 100 different voltage collapse problems in a system when current methods may only detect two or three. It can find 1000 or more double equipment outages that have no loadflow solution that are unknown due to the overwhelming computation required to find them. For each such equipment outage that has no loadflow solution, the method will determine (a) if the lack of solution is due to loadflow algorithm convergence problems or not; (b) which of the over 100 voltage collapse problems is producing the blackout; (c) whether the lack of solution is due to insufficient sufficient reactive supply and the corrective or preventive control that would enable a loadflow solution to be found; (d) whether the lack of solution is due to network reactive losses that require reduction in load(emergency control) to enable a loadflow solution to be found; (e) the corrective and/or emergency controls that require very few control changes because it depends on the structure of the subsystem that initiates the blackout. the method would be used in design, scheduling, and in on-line control of power systems. Currently, it takes an average of 15 hours of engineering manpower/ computation time to obtain a solution and in many cases no solution can be found. The proposed method can be expected to obtain a preventive, corrective or emergency control solution for every equipment outage that has no solution in seconds and without human intervention. It accomplishes the task because it learns and acquires knowledge of the structure of the system that produces cascading instability that is voltage collapse and that produces blackout. This project has substantial commercial potential by reducing blackouts and the economic and societal costs associated with power interruption