SAFEGUARDING THE TRANSMISSION GRID

Interconnected grids throughout the world continue to be disrupted by multiple contingencies and produce widespread and lengthy blackouts affecting thousands of consumers and costing many millions of dollars. A different approach to the operational security is proposed on recognising the critical difficulties that threaten the integrity of EHV transmission grids are the following: - It is impossible to predict the limitless numbers of multiple contingencies, - That unco-ordinated responses of mechanical devices lead to system breakdown. The impasse cannot be overcome without developing an adaptive means for automatically responding to multiple contingencies.This has led to a proposal that uses pattern recognition of parameters changes to identify any threatened cause of breakdown. The parameter changes would not only identify the most affected localities but would also trigger the countermeasures at them, appropriate for that cause of breakdown. This offers an approach for maintaining the integrity of the transmission grid, against multiple contingencies, something that existing security measures are unable to achieve. When implementated the consequent higher transmission line loadings would provide large savings in the operation and development of the power system.