Enhancing Power System Resilience With Controlled Islanding Strategies

Power systems are not designed to survive a large number of simultaneous contingencies and are thus vulnerable to extreme events that can cause considerable societal and economical losses. Power systems resilience against adverse weather events could be enhanced with the implementation of Intentional Controlled Islanding (ICI). This paper presents a strategy design of ICI to improve system survivability in case of severe windstorms. It includes the design of a predetermined network split applied with a preventive and an adaptive approach, and a decision-making process based on the forecast wind speed. The network response to storms is studied dynamically, in order to model cascading failures and protection scheme effects. Simulations are conducted on the IEEE 39-bus system, then the resilience enhancement is assessed with a stochastic approach. ICI is demonstrated to be effective, as the results show an significant decrease of blackout risk while limiting unnecessary load shedding.