Assessment of branch outage contingencies using the continuation method

This paper provides a contribution to the contingency analysis of electric power systems under steady state conditions. An alternative methodology is presented for static contingency analyses that only use continuation methods and thus provides an accurate determination of the loading margin. Rather than starting from the base case operating point, the proposed continuation power flow obtains the post-contingency loading margins starting from the maximum loading and using a bus voltage magnitude as a parameter. The branch selected for the contingency evaluation is parameterised using a scaling factor, which allows its gradual removal and assures the continuation power flow convergence for the cases where the method would diverge for the complete transmission line or transformer removal. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodology have been investigated on IEEE test systems (14, 57 and 118 buses) and compared with the continuation power flow, which obtains the post-contingency loading margin starting from the base case solution. In general, for most of the analysed contingencies, few iterations are necessary to determine the post-contingency maximum loading point. Thus, a significant reduction in the global number of iterations is achieved. Therefore, the proposed methodology can be used as an alternative technique to verify and even to obtain the list of critical contingencies supplied by the electric power systems security analysis function. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.