Catastrophic failures in power systems: Causes, analyses, and countermeasures

Catastrophic failures of power systems are phenomena which occur with some regularity throughout the world. It is recognized that these cannot be prevented, although with the use of newer developments in power engineering, in communication systems' and in computer engineering it would be possible to reduce their frequency and their impact on society. Analyses of many blackouts point to some salient features which are common to most such events: power systems under stress because of high load levels or outages of important facilities, some initiating event-usually a fault, often followed by cascading effects due to unwanted operation of some protection systems. In particular the role of hidden failures (HFs) in protection systems in propagating power system disturbances has become clearer with some of the recent research reported in the literature. This paper explores further the issue of HFs of protection systems and possible countermeasures. Regarding the countermeasures, adapting the protection systems so that they would change their operational logic from OR to a VOTING protocol has been discussed in the literature, and is well within the capability of present technology. Other hardware solutions, such as "Hidden Failure Monitoring and Protection Systems," have also been discussed in the literature. Most of these countermeasures will require intensive use of communication networks. Communication infrastructure will be utilized for real-time data transfer, as well as for slower speed data gathering tasks related to the condition of the power system. In this paper we concentrate on the communication facilities and their applications for providing countermeasures against catastrophic failures of power systems.