Date: 27 October 2023, Friday
Time: 4:30pm
Venue: YEUNG Building B5-207, City University of Hong Kong
Zoom Meeting ID: 967 1968 0176
Password: 123456
Speaker: Dr Dong Liu, City University of Hong Kong
To Reduce Power Outage Risk: Cascading Failure Modeling and Analysis in Modern Power Grids
Dr Dong Liu, City University of Hong Kong
Abstract: Power outages have a catastrophic impact on modern society, disrupting daily routines, causing economic losses, and even threatening public safety. A series of historical blackout events have demonstrated that millions of residences have to live without electricity for a certain period when large-scale systems disturbance occurred. To reduce outage risk in increasingly complex power grids, a great deal of effort has been devoted to cascading failure modeling and analysis over the past few decades. Cascading failure process, where an initial failure triggers a sequence of subsequent failure events and eventually leads to a large-scale blackout. This seminar will discuss cascading failure modeling and analysis in future grids considering the deepened cyber coupling and increased penetration of power electronics. In light of the 2015 Ukraine power outage incident, which confirmed the possibility of power grids being targeted by cyber attacks, we propose an integrated modeling framework for assessing the robustness of cyber-coupled power grids against cascading failure. Our study demonstrates that cyber networks can help mitigate cascading failure, but faults in the cyber layer can also intensify the failure cascade and lead to catastrophic power outages. To better understand the 2019 England power outage event, which was linked to the high penetration of power electronics brought by renewable resources, we proposed a modeling framework that incorporates the dynamical process of frequency control to assess the robustness of high renewable resources-penetrated power systems. Our findings, based on this framework, indicate that the level of renewable energy penetration increases the risk of power outages, emphasizing the need for adequate protective measures.
Speaker’s Bio: Dong Liu graduated from Hong Kong Polytechnic University with BSc(Hons) and PhD degrees in 2015 and 2019, respectively. He worked briefly as a postdoc with the Institute of Textile and Clothing at PolyU, and is presently a postdoc at CityU EE department. His interests include power system robustness and complex network applications.
