Tracing of power flows applied to islanding

Wide area blackouts are still an ever present concern in modern power systems as seen by a number of events in 2003 in Europe and the United States. Islanding is one of the possible methods being proposed as a method to prevent future blackouts. Islanding a power system has the ability to isolate certain parts of a network that are identified as having a risk of instability, or where the source of a cascading fault lies. In large interconnected power system, there needs to be a method to evaluate quickly the best islanding option before a system goes unstable and past the point of no return. This paper uses a power flow tracing methodology coupled with modal analysis to reduce the search space for the islanding solution to identify the smallest island with minimal energy imbalance and also give an indication of the effect of the splitting actions on post-split voltage stability.