Farshid Faghihi

A net balance-based approach in risk assessment of distributed generation curtailment

The penetration of distributed generation (DG) in the grid has been dramatically increasing in recent years. The aggregated effect of DG units can lead to more line congestions and voltage problems in rural areas. Active Network Management (ANM) enables real-time supervision/control of the DG units to curtail the production in case of any congestion(s). The amount of curtailment for each DG unit should be assessed before accepting any new connection to the grid (in planning phase). In this paper, an efficient methodology to assess the risk(s) of accepting to connect a new DG unit is presented. The proposed methodology is based on an importance sampling scheme systematically targeting electrically challenging scenarios. The results provide the expected value (and also the distribution) of the risk of curtailment for each DG unit.

Towards a 3-level blackout probabilistic risk assessment: Achievements and challenges

Although blackouts are infrequent, they result in major societal and economical negative consequences. These massive disruptions to electricity service are due to cascading outages, in which a lot of different phenomena occur. Even if a variety of methods are emerging to study cascading outages, it remains difficult to estimate the risk of blackout for a real grid and dangerous scenarios. Based on the analysis of past blackouts, a 3-level blackout probabilistic risk assessment can be developed in order to consider the main phenomena occurring in a cascading failure in a realistic way. But such an approach encounters several challenges and difficulties. The aim of this paper is to present such an approach, to assess present achievements and to discuss ways of solving future challenges.