Challenges of Cascading Failure Analysis: Modeling, Data and Interdependence

Reliability standards increasingly require transmission utilities and regional transmission operators to regularly assess the vulnerability of their systems to cascading failures. While there is agreement that this analysis should be done, obtaining valid, actionable conclusions from a cascading failure analysis is among the most challenging problems in the electricity industry today. Several difficulties add to this challenge. First, the dynamics of power systems during "emergency" and "in extremis" operations involve complicated interactions between thousands of components and human operators, none of which are likely to perform exactly as the modeling tools predict. Second, the sheer quantity of data that operators obtain from both the models and from the real system make it difficult to transform the resulting corpus of data into valid conclusions. Finally, power systems can no longer be considered independent from other critical infrastructure systems, such as natural gas pipelines and communication networks. This interdependence increases the challenges of cascading failure analysis. This panel will address these challenges directly by bringing together both researchers and industry experts who see promising solutions on the horizon.