Improving Power Grid Stability With Communication Infrastructure

Efficient control of power systems is becoming increasingly difficult as they gain in complexity and size. By considering a power grid and a communication infrastructure as a multiplex network, we propose an automatic control strategy that regulates the mechanical power output of the generators based on information obtained via communication links (wireless or wired). An algorithm that optimizes steady-state stability of a power grid by iteratively adding communication links is presented. The proposed control scheme is successfully applied to the IEEE New England and the IEEE RTS 96 power systems, leading to a significant increase in the steady-state stability of the systems and an improvement in their overall robustness. The resulting communication network topology differs significantly from the transmission grid topology. This shows how complex the steady-state control for power systems is, influenced by the generators' configuration, the transmission network topology, and the manner by which control is executed.