Risk evaluation for hypothesized multiple busbar outages

Online N - 1 or higher order contingencies presented at the control center console are enforced to ensure that the system can withstand a sudden disturbance under abnormal operating conditions. As the communication has evolved toward IP-based platform that further integrates with the physical facilities of substation protection, a potential cyberattack upon certain protection schemes can weaken the system operating conditions. Bus differential relays are one of the protection schemes that can de-energize and isolate partial/entire substation from the system due to the large number of components connected to it. The reverse pyramid model (RPM) is proposed in this work to systematically enumerate the combinations of hypothesized electrical disconnection protected by busbar differential relays in a substation. Two metrics are introduced: (1) bottleneck combination list and (2) risk index for individual busbars. These indices are provided to help dispatchers in the control centers with systems security readiness and decision making.