Demand response programs vs congestion and cascading line outages in smart grids.

Cascading line outages may result in minor or major blackouts, which are considered as a main concern in the power system operation. Usually when a line is disconnected from the grid due to any reason, other lines may fail due to the congestion. So, this procedure may cause the cascading line outages. On the other hand, the demand response programs (DRPs) can be applied as an efficient, environmental friendly, and sustainable tool in preventing the cascading line outages. In this paper, a new procedure has been presented by which the direct load control (DLC) is applied intelligently as a common DRP in order to prevent the cascading line outages. In the proposed method, first the critical lines are recognized based on the line failure distribution factors (LODFs) and generalized line outage distribution factors (GLODFs). Then, the optimal busses for implementing DRPs are appointed based on power transfer distribution factors (PTDFs). After that, by applying dynamic DC optimal power flow (DCOPF), not only the cascading line outages are prevented, but also the optimal incentives in DLC are determined simultaneously. In fact, the proposed method has significant benefits both for the customers and utility. To show the effectiveness of our proposed technique, it is applied on the IEEE 118-bus test system. Results indicate the practical benefits of the presented method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]