Distributing Power Grid State Estimation on HPC Clusters - A System Architecture Prototype

The future power grid is expected to further expand with highly distributed energy sources and smart loads. The increased size and complexity lead to increased burden on existing computational resources in energy control centers. Thus the need to perform real-time assessment on such systems entails efficient means to distribute centralized functions such as state estimation in the power system. In this paper, we present our experience of prototyping a system architecture that connects distributed state estimators individually running parallel programs to solve non-linear estimation procedure. Through our experience, we highlight the needs of integrating the distributed state estimation algorithm with efficient partition and data communication tools so that distributed state estimation has low overhead compared to the centralized solution. We build a test case based on the IEEE 118 bus system and partition the state estimation of the whole system model to available HPC clusters. The measurement from the test bed demonstrates the low overhead of our solution.