Considering voltage stress in preventive islanding

Wide area blackouts are an ever present concern in modern power systems as seen by recent events across the world, including India in 2012. Islanding a power system has the ability to isolate certain parts of a network that are identified as having a risk of instability and prevent the problems cascading. In large interconnected power systems, there is a need to evaluate quickly the best islanding option before a system goes unstable. This paper uses a power flow tracing methodology coupled with a voltage stress indicator to reduce the search space for the islanding solution to identify the smallest island with minimal energy imbalance and also give an indication of the effect of the splitting actions on post-split voltage stress.