Study of Cascading Failure Duration in Power Grid using Historical Outage Data and Simulation Model

Cascading failures in an interconnected system like a power grid can result in a large number of line outages and even blackouts. In this paper, we have studied the duration of cascading failures using historical utility outage data and simulated data. We have estimated the distribution function of cascading failure duration and determined the average duration of a cascading failure process. We have incorporated a cascading failure simulation model with ac power flow to compare our empirical results with the simulated result using two 500 bus synthetic grid test cases, one of which has been generated using AutoSynGrid - a Matlab-based toolkit with a similar connection topology of the utility system. We have also analyzed the effect of different loading levels on cascading failure duration. The results were in good agreement for both cases which validate the distribution of cascading failure duration and also the simulation model.