End-Product Design Report

Abstract:

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has responsibility for operating the Texas Transmission Control Center in Austin, Texas, which monitors and controls the Texas Transmission System, one of the three electric power interconnections in the continental United States. One of the most important control center functions is security-related decision-making, where measurements are taken throughout the transmission system, communicated back to the control center, and processed into a power flow model, so that the power flow model can then be utilized to perform "what-if" analysis (e.g., what if line 832 is lost, what if generator 73 is lost, etc) in order to determine the security level of the system. If the security level is deemed too risky, some kind of action must be taken by the operator in order to decrease the risk. This process is currently implemented at ERCOT (and at most control centers in the country) using a deterministic (non-probabilistic) approach. ERCOT is interested in using a probabilistic approach developed recently at Iowa State University and available via a set of Matlab routines which provides assessment and suggested decisions based on risk indices. In this project the students will refine and update these Matlab routines and apply them to a transmission model of the ERCOT system. The expected deliverable will be, for a single power flow model, a comparison of the deterministic results typically obtained at the ERCOT control center to a set of risk-based results obtained from the ISU software.

Team Members:

Faculty Advisor:

James D. McCalley

2210 Coover

Ames, IA 50011

(515) 294-4844

jdm

 

Client:

Steven Myers
ERCOT Control Center