Discussion of protection and cascading outages from the viewpoint of communication

Power grid and communication network, which depends on each other to provide proper functionality, are becoming more and more coupled together. Failure of a fraction of nodes in communication networks may lead to a failure even a cascade of failures in power grid. Wide area protection is highly dependent on communication. The failure of communication in some part of wide area protection system will affect the realization of the function to prevent cascading outages and result in serious consequences. Based on Manchester, OPA and hidden failure cascading failure models and considered the feature of relay protection, an improved cascading failure model is established. Then it is used to analyze the dynamic process of communication fails in wide area protection system and IEEE 30 bus system is employed to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Results show that communication failure in protection system will accelerate the cascading outages of power grid. Effective solutions to reduce the communication risk are discussed. The work of this paper is available for reference to analyze the process of cascading outages and design protection system preventing cascading outages.