Smart Sampling for Reduced and Representative Power System Scenario Selection

With increasing penetration of renewable energy and active market participation, power system operation scenarios and patterns have increased exponentially. This has led to challenges in identifying a good subset of scenarios for routine planning, operation, and emerging machine learning applications. To address these challenges, we develop an approach integrating comprehensive exploratory data analyses and smart sampling techniques to identify and select a small subset of representative power system scenarios that maintain the coverage of system scenarios and operation envelope, therefore, leading to very efficient, yet representative studies and analysis. We propose a hierarchical Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) technique for smart sampling, which allows free-form distributions of system load and considers generator commitment status along with generation levels. A set of performance metrics are also defined for systematic evaluation of the adequacy and efficiency of the sampled cases. The developed approach and metrics are demonstrated using the Texas 2000 bus system in this paper and will be extended to the more complex real world systems such as Western Interconnect System.