Implementation of slow coherency based controlled islanding using DIgSILENT powerfactory and MATLAB

Intentional controlled islanding is a novel emergency control technique to mitigate wide-area instabilities by intelligently separating the power network into a set of self-sustainable islands. During the last decades, it has gained an increased attention due to the recent severe blackouts all over the world. Moreover, the increasing uncertainties in power system operation and planning put more requirements on the performance of the emergency control and stimulate the development of advanced System Integrity Protection Schemes (SIPS). As compared to the traditional SIPS, such as out-of-step protection, ICI is an adaptive online emergency control algorithm that aims to consider multiple objectives when separating the network. This chapter illustrates a basic ICI algorithm implemented in PowerFactory. It utilises the slow coherency theory and constrained graph partitioning in order to promote transient stability and create islands with a reasonable power balance. The algorithm is also capable to exclude specified network branches from the search space. The implementation is based on the coupling of Python and MATLAB program codes. It relies on the PowerFactory support of the Python scripting language (introduced in version 15.1) and the MATLAB Engine for Python (introduced in release 8.4). The chapter also provides a case study to illustrate the application of the presented ICI algorithm for wide-area instability mitigation in the PST 16 benchmark system.