Controlled Islanding Demonstrations on the WECC System

Cascading outages have resulted in significant disruptions to power systems all over the world. Controlled islanding can provide a corrective measure of last resort to alleviate the impact of large disturbances. This paper provides detailed demonstrations of using controlled islanding to prevent cascading outages in bulk power systems. To test the islanding performance, four extreme contingencies under two different operating conditions of the WECC system are tested using time domain simulations. The cutsets used in the controlled islanding cases are obtained from a software package developed in earlier work by the authors. Time domain simulation results for the four contingencies with controlled islanding and uncontrolled islanding are shown, and the dynamic performance in each case is analyzed. Further analyses are conducted to examine the amount of load shed in each case, and a discussion of the cutset sensitivity and time sensitivity of islanding is provided. Finally, the discussion of practical implementation issues and conclusions is provided.