Non-wire Methods for

Transmission Congestion
Management through Predictive
Simulation and Optimization
Presented by Research Team
Ruisheng Diao, Ph.D., P.E. PNNL:
Senior Research Engineer Henry Huang (PI), Yuri Makarov,
Electricity Infrastructure Shuangshuang Jin, Yousu Chen
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory PowerWorld:
[email protected] Jamie Weber, Thomas Nicol
Quanta Technology:
Guorui Zhang
BPA:
James Wong, Brian Tuck

June 30th, 2015

 Transmission Congestion an Ever
Increasing Challenge
Incur significant economic cost
2012: $193 million import congestion charges of major inter-ties at
California ISO, increased by 77.5% from 2010 [1]
2010: >$1.1 billion congestion cost at New York ISO [2]
2010: $ 1.43 billion congestion cost PJM-wide [3]
Power flow pattern changes impact congestion issues
Introduction of renewable generation and new markets
E.g. wind generation curtailment due to transmission congestion
Congestion will become worse and more complicated
Uncertainty, stochastic power flow patterns due to changing
generation and load patterns, increased renewable generation,
distributed generation, demand response and the increasing
complexity of energy and ancillary service markets and Balancing
Authority (BA) coordination.
[1] California ISO, 2012 Annual Report on Market Issues and Performance, April 2013
[2] NYISO, 2011 Congestion Assessment and Resource Integration Study, March 2012
[3] PJM, Congestion and the PJM Regional Transmission Expansion Plan, Dec. 2011
2
2
 Traditional Means of Congestion
Management Faces Significant Constraints
Three traditional means of congestion management (all
require capital investment) [4]:
Build more generation close to load centers.
Reduce load through energy efficiency and demand reduction programs.
Build more transmission capacity in appropriate locations.
Transmission expansion is constrained by:
Financial and cost-recovery issues
Right-of-way issues
Environmental considerations
New approaches:
Dynamic Line Rating (DLR), thermal limited
Validated at RTE, France and Oncor, TX
Real-time path rating, security/stability limited
Validated the concept at BPA, CAISO and ERCOT in an offline setting
No tools available due to intensive computational requirements using existing
techniques
[4] 2012 National Electric Transmission Congestion Study. David Meyer, U.S. DOE, August 2012.

3
 Possibility of Utilizing More of What We
Already Have
Example - California Oregon Intertie (COI) [5]

Path Ratings U75, U90 and U(Limit)

Thermal rating
>10,000 MW U75 % of time flow
exceeds 75% of OTC
(3,600 MW for COI)

U90 - % of time flow

Stability Rating exceeds 90% of OTC
(4,320 MW for COI)
(Transient Stability and
Voltage Stability)
U(Limit) - % of time flow
reaches 100% of OTC
(4,800 MW for COI)
<5,000 MW
75% 90% 100%
% of OTC

[5] Western interconnection 2006 congestion management study

4
 Real-Time Path Rating

Current Path Rating Practice and Limitations

Offline studies with worst-case scenario
Ratings are static for the operating season
The result: conservative (most of the time) path rating
Real-Time Path Rating
On-line studies with current operating scenarios
Ratings are dynamic based on real-time operating conditions
The result: realistic path rating, leading to maximum use of
transmission assets and relieving transmission congestion

5
 Real-time Path Rating Case Studies

IEEE 39-bus power system

26% more capacity without building new transmission lines

2500
Transfer limit of a critical path, MW

Real-time Path Rating

2000

25.74% more energy transfer

1500 using real-time path rating

1000
Offline path rating, current practice

500

0
5 10 15 20
Time, hour

6
 Real-time Path Rating Case Studies (BPA)

West of Cascades North Northern Intertie

Full-topology model compared to WECC planning model Full-topology model to study real
time
Sept. 14, 2010 unplanned outage
M a y 18 - 1 9, 2 01 0 W O C N E ve nt

9000

8000

O ver 1100 M W
7000

6000

5000 W O C N A c tu a l F low
W O C N re al-tim e S O L - v olta g e lim it
S ta te E stim a to r V o lta ge Lim it
4000
5 /1 7 /1 0 5 /1 8 /1 0 5 /1 8 /1 0 5 /1 8 /1 0 5 /1 8 /1 0 5 /1 9 /1 0 5 /1 9 /1 0 5 /1 9 /1 0 5 /1 9 /1 0

Minimize Real-Time Curtailments

DA TE

May 18-22, 2010 Sept. 14, 2010

104.5 hrs. X 1,000 MW X $30.36 X 25% Reduced 24 hrs to 2 hrs.
= $793,000 22 hrs X 1500 MW X $40.36 X 50%
= $665,000

7
 Technical Approach and Objectives
Technology Summary
Objective: tap into unused capacities
to manage transmission congestion
1. Develop HPC based transient and voltage stability simulation
with innovative mathematical methods Short term goal: develop technologies
2. Develop HPC based real-time path rating capability with to determine how much unused
predictability and uncertainty quantification
capacity.
3. Demonstrate the non-wire method on a commercial software
platform with real-life power system scenarios Long term goal: integrate unused
capacities in power grid operation
Technology Impact and markets (beyond the project)
- Improve power system transmission asset utilization
- Manage transmission congestion without building new wires
- Facilitate integration of renewable generation and smart grid
technologies

Proposed Targets
Metric State of the Art Proposed

Simulation speed 3-5 times slower 10-20 times faster

than real time than real time
Path rating study Months <10 minutes
internal
Uncertainty No Yes
quantification
Asset utilization Conservative Enhanced by
8 ~30%
 Main Flowchart

9
 Parallel computing holds the promise for
achieving the 10 minutes goal
Parallelism:
Path 2 MW
(1) PF MCA
Other Boundary Cases Parallel over contingencies
(voltage violation criterion)
(2) Orbiting for each contingency
Parallel over contingencies
(3) Dyn sim test
First Boundary Case
Parallel over boundary points
(voltage violation criterion) (4) Dyn MCA
Two-level parallel

Other Boundary Cases

(voltage violation criterion)

Boundary Case
(transient stability criterion)
Base Case

Path 1 MW

PF = Power Flow; MCA = Massive Contingency Analysis; dyn sim = dynamic simulation

10
 Increasing Complexity to Run System Studies
Increasing complexity in power
grid models requires more
intensive computation
Model size is ever increasing
More details being considered
Wind/solar models
Composite load models
Demand response
Energy storage
Relays
UDMs for RAS, SPS, etc.
Total number of buses and generators in WECC model for different study years
Very time consuming to 25,000
buses
complete one dynamic generators
20,000
simulation
100s or more to run a 20s 15,000
WECC-size no-fault
simulation using 10,000

commercial tools
5,000
(2.4GHz Duo Core, 4GB of
RAM) 0
2003 2007 2011 2016 202211
11 Study Year
 Bottleneck Identified

Most commercial tools used in power industry are optimized for single-
processor computers
Core algorithms developed 10-30 years ago, with much smaller model
size
Powerflow analysis
Dynamic simulation
Small signal stability analysis
However, CPU clock speed is not increasing as expected
One popular way of speeding up massive simulations is through
distributed computing

Serial computing
time

Distributed computing

Limiting factor affecting total computation time

12 time
 Performance of Massive Contingency
Analysis

Idea: dynamically allocate massive contingency analysis scenarios to

different processors based on their availability

Implemented in GridPACK
Tested on a WECC base case
400 contingencies
C++ based
Computational load
balancing using a global
counter
13
 Performance of Parallel Dynamic Simulation
Goal: Achieve 10x speedup over todays commercial tool
Key algorithms: 0 = g ( x, y )

Decoupled models for

= f ( x, y )
dx
dt
calculating states in parallel

Identified a better linear solver for solving network coupling

(9.56 ms vs 29.79 ms in PowerWorld for a complete linear
solve on a WECC system)
15.82s to complete a 30-s dynamic simulation using 8 cores,
14
on a WECC size system with classical generator model
 Dynamic Simulation Procedure

Key steps
Solve power flow
Convert loads to constant impedance
Expand admittance matrix (Y) with load impedance
and machine Norton impedance
Update Y with switching events
Initialize state variables using power flow solution
Parallel
Calculate generator current injection processing
Solve network equation for voltages
Calculate dx/dt
Update x
Integration method: modified Euler

15
15
 Fast Voltage Stability Simulation
Goal: Develop a non-iterative method to find voltage stability boundaries
Developed and combined several methods
Continuation power flow
X-ray theorem
Orbiting method
High-order numerical method
Accuracy validated against PW
Only 9.5 s to find a new boundary
point after initial point is identified
for a WECC-size model
(~10 times faster than todays approach)

16
 Nomogram Generation

56

55

54
COI Interface (100MW)

53

52

51

50

49

48

47
81 82 83 84 85 86
NOJ Interface (100MW)
17
 Current performance progresses well
towards the 10 minutes goal
Example BPA Procedure:
Path 2 MW
- WECC-size model (16,000-bus)
- 400 PF contingencies
- 5 dyn sim contingencies
- 10 boundary points
- 400 processors
- Total time:
102 + 95 + 20 + 60 + overhead
= 277 seconds + overhead
< 5 minutes
- 200 processors
- Total time:
554 seconds + overhead
< 10 minutes
Base Case

Path 1 MW

PF = Power Flow; MCA = Massive Contingency Analysis; dyn sim = dynamic simulation

18
 Conclusions
Transmission congestion is an ever increasing challenge, esp. with new
generation and consumption of electricity.
Real-time path rating could have major impact in congestion
management and asset utilization improvement.
Key simulation engines were successfully developed
Fast dynamic simulation
Fast voltage stability simulation
Massive contingency analysis simulation
Progress to date indicates the 10 minute performance goal is very well
achievable.

19