Creating cascading failure scenarios in interconnected power systems

The reported catastrophic failures of power systems from different geographical parts of the world often point to cascading outage events of system elements that eventually had led to system blackout. Although the initiating events of these cascading failures may, at times, be avoidable by vegetation management or proper protection settings, the occurrence of such an event as well as the eventual impact cannot always be predicted. There is much debate in the industry whether the operator has enough time to apply countermeasures to avoid blackouts. Besides, the process of determining effective countermeasures cannot be deemed accurate unless a system has been extensively studied for the occurrence of widespread blackouts. In this paper, methods to create different cascading failure scenarios are developed under credible contingency conditions. The methods are tested on the 118 bus test system and several cases are reported.