Expanding transmission planning capabilities for NERC standard TPL-001-2 compliance

North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Standard TPL-001-2 has been adopted by the NERC Board of Trustees and will become effective in the near future. The TPL-001-2 standard was developed to identify events which will cause reliability violations and more severe system impacts including cascading. It also requires simulation of protection system actions in contingency analysis and development of corrective actions for system deficiencies and possible preventive actions to reduce the likelihood of cascading and mitigate the consequences. To meet the compliance with this Standard, an innovative transmission planning method is developed which includes: (1) identification of contingencies which will cause reliability violations or produce more severe system impacts including cascading; (2) development of corrective actions to achieve required system performance, and identification of actions to prevent the spread of cascading outages, or to mitigate the cascading consequences; and (3) ranking of the severity of the events and evaluation of cascading-causing events.