Power System Blackout Model via OPF and Its Self-organized Criticality

Based on the essence of self-organized criticality, this paper develops a novel model to study the cascading failures and blackouts in power systems with optimal power flow applications, which contains two types of dynamics, fast dynamics and slow dynamics. This model has also voltage stability analysis capacity and can reveal critical characteristics from the reactive power and voltage viewpoint. Simulation results of IEEE 30-bus system with the proposed model show that the fast dynamics simulation can capture both the process of the cascading failures and the self-organized criticality property respect to the micro scale. Furthermore, the macro scale of self-organized criticality of power systems can be revealed according to the ratio of total load demand to the total network power transfer capability. Finally, this work has verified that improving the transmission capability of network could effectively reduce blackout risk.