Voltage collapse in complex power grids

John W. Simpson-Porco (), Florian Dörfler and Francesco Bullo
Additional contact information
John W. Simpson-Porco: Engineering Building 5, University of Waterloo
Florian Dörfler: Automatic Control Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
Francesco Bullo: Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation, Engineering Building II, University of California at Santa Barbara

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract A large-scale power grid’s ability to transfer energy from producers to consumers is constrained by both the network structure and the nonlinear physics of power flow. Violations of these constraints have been observed to result in voltage collapse blackouts, where nodal voltages slowly decline before precipitously falling. However, methods to test for voltage collapse are dominantly simulation-based, offering little theoretical insight into how grid structure influences stability margins. For a simplified power flow model, here we derive a closed-form condition under which a power network is safe from voltage collapse. The condition combines the complex structure of the network with the reactive power demands of loads to produce a node-by-node measure of grid stress, a prediction of the largest nodal voltage deviation, and an estimate of the distance to collapse. We extensively test our predictions on large-scale systems, highlighting how our condition can be leveraged to increase grid stability margins.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10790 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms10790

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10790

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().