Speeding Up Electromagnetic Transient Simulations for Inverter-Based Resources: Australian experience

As the penetration of complex software-driven inverter-based resources (IBRs) rapidly increases in power systems around the world, the need for modeling large areas of these systems in a time-domain electromagnetic transient (EMT) environment has also increased. Since 2016, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has been developing “large-scale” EMT models of parts of Australia’s interconnected Eastern Australian power system, known as the National Electricity Market (NEM), for use across many of AEMO’s functions as the NEM’s independent system operator. Due to the size and complexity of the models, these simulations have required large computational requirements and were typically very slow, taking more than 24 h for a 30-s simulation in 2016.