The Anatomy of the 2016 South Australia Blackout: A Catastrophic Event in a High Renewable Network

By R. Yan, Nahid-Al- Masood, Tapan Kumar Saha, Feifei Bai, Huajie Gu. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 2018

297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last decade, many power systems have significantly changed with the proliferation of renewable generation sources, such as wind and solar photovoltaic. Due to their variability and nonsynchronous nature, new challenges and complexities have emerged regarding operational security of modern power systems. The 2016 South Australia (SA) blackout was the first known blackout due to such a high renewable situation. An official report has recently been published to review the causes and provide the corresponding recommendations for improvement of network operation, control, and security. However, there are still a number of critical issues and debates which remain unsolved, such as network bottleneck identification, overvoltage explanation, pole slip concern, frequency dip mystery, and frequency/voltage instability debate. In this paper, based on the reconstruction of the event, these unsettled issues are prudently analyzed to unveil their root causes. In addition, an innovative scheme is proposed to prevent the blackout by identifying the network separation at an early stage. This research will not only further advance the understanding of the 2016 SA blackout, but also will provide valuable guidelines for the management of future renewable-rich networks.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/301c86aafbf94ea8b893a6ce42663bcdec0a0b48

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In Control and Systems Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A review on rapid responsive energy storage technologies for frequency regulation in modern power systems (2020, background): “Large frequency excursions cause the tripping of loads and generators, which may lead to system collapse [6, 7, 8, 9].”
Peer-to-Peer Energy Systems for Connected Communities: A Review of Recent Advances and Emerging Challenges (2020, background): “5) Controllable DER: DERs without coordination and control introduce reverse power flows, voltage rise, and increased fault currents within the electricity network [62] that can lead to a widespread catastrophic event like a blackout [63] and therefore trigger the need for network equipment reinforc”