Contingency Analysis
If a problem occurs on the electric power grid, such as a transmission line going out of service, there are various issues that may surface across the grid. Loads may be lost and voltages may sag, or even collapse in various areas as a result. Operators refer to such unexpected outages as “contingencies” and manage the system in a way that ensures any single contingency will not propagate into a cascading blackout.
Given the sheer number of contingency cases in the problem space and the real-time requirements for power grid operations, today’s industry algorithms and tools are not able to handle comprehensive contingency analysis.
Utilizing the Cray XMT, PNNL is developing a computational framework for advanced contingency analysis. The main idea is to use the combination of the AMD Opteron nodes and the XMT ThreadStorm nodes for addressing different parts of the integrated contingency analysis problem. This approach will provide, for the first time, a practical and scalable solution to the challenging problem and will increase the grid operator’s ability to deal effectively with outages and failures with the power grid components while preserving stable and safe operation of the grid.
