Impacts of Wind Power Uncertainty on Grid Vulnerability to Cascading Overload Failures

Higher penetration of renewables like wind power generation will introduce an unprecedented amount of uncertainty into the grid that might severely affect the grid vulnerability to cascading failures. In this study, we propose a mixed OPF-stochastic approach to analyze and simulate cascading failures in power grid and to evaluate the impact of wind generation in terms of its penetration and uncertainty level. The proposed approach incorporates both thermal stability model for transmission line outage and automatic power balance algorithms. Numerical simulation results on the IEEE 300 bus system indicate that uncertainty coming from wind energy has severe impacts on grid vulnerability to cascading overload failures under different contingency scenarios. Results also suggest that higher penetration levels of wind energy, if not managed appropriately, will add to this severity because higher uncertainties may be injected into weaker lines in a grid.