A new unified scheme for controlled power system separation using synchronized phasor measurements

Controlled power system separation, which separates the transmission system into islands in a controlled manner, is considered the final resort against a blackout under severe disturbances, e.g., cascading events. Three critical problems of controlled separation are where and when to separate and what to do after separation, which are rarely studied together. They are addressed in this paper by a proposed unified controlled separation scheme based on synchrophasors. The scheme decouples the three problems by partitioning them into sub-problems handled strategically in three time stages: the Offline Analysis stage determines elementary generator groups, optimizes potential separation points in between, and designs post-separation control strategies; the Online Monitoring stage predicts separation boundaries by modal analysis on synchrophasor data; the Real-time Control stage calculates a synchrophasor-based separation risk index for each boundary to predict the time to perform separation. The proposed scheme is demonstrated on a 179-bus power system by case studies.