Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Resiliency of power grid, is known as the ability to predict, adapt to and quickly recover from disruptive natural events. Among the natural events, the most destructive to power grid is the Geomagnetic Disturbance (GMD), also called Solar Storm, caused by the violent outburst of explosive activities on the Sun. The GMD produces the flow of Geomagnetically Induced Current (GIC) in the power grid and the past history has demonstrated its ability to disrupt power grid's normal operation and cause a widespread blackout. In the mild GMD event of March 1989, the Hydro-Quebec power system collapsed and left more than six million customers without power for nine hours, at an approximate cost of $300 million. In addition, this GMD event resulted in major damage to several power transformers, and over 200 alarming and mal-operations of protection and control systems across Canada and United States. The US National Academies estimates that a severe GMD has the potential to cause $12 trillion damage (only in the US) with a recovery time of four to ten years [1]. Such massive consequences are the most severe among all the known natural events. In spite of the known consequences, the GMD technical bases have not been well developed yet. As a result, the existing recommendations and damage predictions are sometimes contradictory. Also, the calculation approaches are based on a number of simplifying assumptions and thus not sufficiently accurate and reliable. Such inaccuracies can result in millions of dollars of capital investment and operational costs for power utilities. This research program aims to address the gaps in the research and provide accurate solution techniques, open a broad research horizon with high technical contents, and raise the practical issues which have not been addressed, yet. The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to achieve high resilience and reliability for the current and next-generation power grid when exposed to GMDs. In the short-term, the research focus will be on the following objectives:1- Develop a detailed multi-zone multi-layer earth model for an accurate calculation of the induced geoelectric field, taking into account uniform and non-uniform 3D geomagnetic fields. 2- Develop an advanced transformer model for GMD studies as the GMD consequences originate from the transformer saturation due to GIC. Therefore, the accuracy of the GMD studies highly depends on the employed transformer model. 3- Developing a coupled AC-DC real-time simulator based on the wide-area measurement system to maintain the power flow control and stability of power system during GMDs4- Developing an advanced harmonic simulation methodology to assess the impacts of the GMD-caused harmonic flow in power system and identify the system and equipment at risk during GMDs5- Assessment of the GMD impacts on renewable energy resources and microgrids as the building blocks of the next-generation power system