Investigating Practical Measures to Reduce Power Outages and Energy Curtailments

This work attempts to investigate some practical measures that may reduce severe power outages that lead to energy curtailments. The first step of this attempt is to explore, from the consumer’s perspective, the adverse effects of the energy curtailments that reflect enormous damages (tangible and intangible) to the residential sector in the city of Riyadh (the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). The second step is to propose, analyze, and employ energy conservation strategies that lead to both energy conservation and costs savings. The study results show that some customers will suffer enormous tangible and intangible losses should these outages occur during specific times, seasons, and for prolonged durations. In order to reduce these power outages and hence mitigate their adverse effects and consequences, the study proposes proper practical measures and solutions without compromising the consumers’ needs, satisfaction, and convenience.

Investigation of Large Capacity Boiler "Four Tube" Bursting and Leakage Outages

Since adopting reform and opening policy. the electric power industry in China developed rapidly. At present there are more than 200 units of 200 MW and above large generation units. Due to hasty development, problems are numerous, especially for the boilers. In the 1986-1990 period (Seventh Five-year Plan period), large capacity boiler outages accounted for 65.8% of all large units equipment outages, and "four tube"

Multi-Layer Optimization for Load Scheduling to Manage Unreliable Grid Outages in Developing Countries

This paper describes the significant cost saving opportunities for consumers in developing countries by the use of computational intelligence and demand-side-management techniques to mitigate the massive use of diesel back-up during grid outages. Application of load scheduling optimization is investigated during scheduled power outages, for residential consumer in India. The specific load shifting approaches explored include a day ahead predicted load schedule which is generated by performing a DSM referring to the forecasted day ahead outage. Whereas in reality the predicted may not match the actual outage, thus in these cases a fuzzy logic rule base is referred on real time basis to take corrective action & reach the best optimal load schedule possible to attain the lowest cost. The load types modeled include passive loads and schedulable, i.e. typically heavy loads. It is found that this multi-level DSM schemes show excellent benefits to the consumer. The maximum diesel savings for the consumer due to load shifting can be approximately ranging from 45% to as high as 75% for a flat-tariff grid. The study also showed that the actual savings potential depends on the timing of power outage, duration and the specific load characteristics.

Bridging GPS outages of tightly-coupled GPS/SINS using GMDH neural network

A tightly coupled GPS （ global positioning system ）/SINS （ strap down inertial navigation system） based on a GMDH （ group method of data handling） neural network was presented to solve the problem of degraded accuracy for less than four visible GPS satellites with poor signal quality. Positions and velocities of the satellites were predicted by a GMDH neural network, and the pseudo ranges and pseudo range rates received by the GPS receiver were simulated to ensure the regular op eration of the GPS/SINS Kalman filter during outages. In the mathematical simulation a tightly cou pled navigation system with a proposed approach has better navigation accuracy during GPS outages, and the anti jamming ability is strengthened for the tightly coupled navigation system.

A Generalized Accelerated Failure Time Model to Predict Restoration Time from Power Outages

Major disasters such as wildfire, tornado, hurricane, tropical storm, and flooding cause disruptions in infrastructure systems such as power and water supply, wastewater management, telecommunication, and transportation facilities. Disruptions in electricity infrastructure have negative impacts on sectors throughout a region, including education, medical services,financial services, and recreation. In this study, we introduced a novel approach to investigate the factors that can be associated with longer restoration time of power service after a hurricane. Considering restoration time as the dependent variable and using a comprehensive set of county-level data, we estimated a generalized accelerated failure time(GAFT) model that accounts for spatial dependence among observations for time to event data. The model fit improved by 12% after considering the effects of spatial correlation in time to event data. Using the GAFT model and Hurricane Irma's impact on Florida as a case study, we examined:(1) differences in electric power outages and restoration rates among different types of power companies—investor-owned power companies, rural and municipal cooperatives;(2) the relationship between the duration of power outage and power system variables;and(3) the relationship between the duration of power outage and socioeconomic attributes. The findings of this study indicate that counties with a higher percentage of customers served by investor-owned electric companies and lower median household income faced power outage for a longer time. This study identified the key factors to predict restoration time of hurricane-induced power outages, allowing disaster management agencies to adopt strategies required for restoration process.

Reflections on stability technology for reducing risk of system collapse due to cascading outages

This paper aims at putting forward viewpoints regarding the use of stability technology to prevent and control cascading outages by examining recent blackout events.Based on the inquiry reports of the 2011 SouthwestAmerica blackout and the 2012 India power blackouts,event evolution features are first summarized from a stability perspective.Then a comparative analysis is conducted so as to propose suggestions of effective measures,either preventive or emergency,which could have avoided the blackouts.It is shown that applications of several mature technologies can create opportunities of preventing or interrupting the cascading development.These include offline dynamic simulation,online stability analysis and preventive control,real-time situational awareness and automatic emergency control.Further R&D directions are given to address the challenges of modern power systems as well.They cover system fault identification criterion of protection and control devices,verification of adaptability of control effect to system operating conditions,real-time operational management of emergency control measures and improvement of simulation accuracy.

Distributed IRS-Aided DF Relaying Systems:Performance Analysis and Optimization

Intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)is a newly emerged and promising paradigm to substantially improve the performance of wireless communications by constructing favorable communication channels via properly tuning massive reflecting elements.This paper considers a distributed IRS aided decode-and-forward(DF)relaying system over Nakagami-m fading channels.Based on a tight approximation for the distribution of the received signalto-noise ratio(SNR),we first derive exact closed-form expressions of the outage probability,ergodic capacity,and energy efficiency for the considered system.Moreover,we propose the optimal IRS configuration considering the energy efficiency and pilot overhead.Finally,we compare the performance between the distributed IRS-aided DF relaying and multi-IRS-only systems,and verify the analytical results by using monte carlo simulations.

Secrecy Outage Probability Minimization in Wireless-Powered Communications Using an Improved Biogeography-Based Optimization-Inspired Recurrent Neural Network

This paper focuses on wireless-powered communication systems,which are increasingly relevant in the Internet of Things(IoT)due to their ability to extend the operational lifetime of devices with limited energy.The main contribution of the paper is a novel approach to minimize the secrecy outage probability(SOP)in these systems.Minimizing SOP is crucial for maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of data,especially in situations where the transmission of sensitive data is critical.Our proposed method harnesses the power of an improved biogeography-based optimization(IBBO)to effectively train a recurrent neural network(RNN).The proposed IBBO introduces an innovative migration model.The core advantage of IBBO lies in its adeptness at maintaining equilibrium between exploration and exploitation.This is accomplished by integrating tactics such as advancing towards a random habitat,adopting the crossover operator from genetic algorithms(GA),and utilizing the global best(Gbest)operator from particle swarm optimization(PSO)into the IBBO framework.The IBBO demonstrates its efficacy by enabling the RNN to optimize the system parameters,resulting in significant outage probability reduction.Through comprehensive simulations,we showcase the superiority of the IBBO-RNN over existing approaches,highlighting its capability to achieve remarkable gains in SOP minimization.This paper compares nine methods for predicting outage probability in wireless-powered communications.The IBBO-RNN achieved the highest accuracy rate of 98.92%,showing a significant performance improvement.In contrast,the standard RNN recorded lower accuracy rates of 91.27%.The IBBO-RNN maintains lower SOP values across the entire signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)spectrum tested,suggesting that the method is highly effective at optimizing system parameters for improved secrecy even at lower SNRs.

Outage Analysis of Optimal UAV Cooperation with IRS via Energy Harvesting Enhancement Assisted Computational Offloading

The utilization of mobile edge computing(MEC)for unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)communication presents a viable solution for achieving high reliability and low latency communication.This study explores the potential of employing intelligent reflective surfaces(IRS)andUAVs as relay nodes to efficiently offload user computing tasks to theMEC server system model.Specifically,the user node accesses the primary user spectrum,while adhering to the constraint of satisfying the primary user peak interference power.Furthermore,the UAV acquires energy without interrupting the primary user’s regular communication by employing two energy harvesting schemes,namely time switching(TS)and power splitting(PS).The selection of the optimal UAV is based on the maximization of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio.Subsequently,the analytical expression for the outage probability of the system in Rayleigh channels is derived and analyzed.The study investigates the impact of various system parameters,including the number of UAVs,peak interference power,TS,and PS factors,on the system’s outage performance through simulation.The proposed system is also compared to two conventional benchmark schemes:the optimal UAV link transmission and the IRS link transmission.The simulation results validate the theoretical derivation and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme over the benchmark schemes.

Optimal Bidding Strategies of Microgrid with Demand Side Management for Economic Emission Dispatch Incorporating Uncertainty and Outage of Renewable Energy Sources

In the restructured electricity market,microgrid(MG),with the incorporation of smart grid technologies,distributed energy resources(DERs),a pumped-storage-hydraulic(PSH)unit,and a demand response program(DRP),is a smarter and more reliable electricity provider.DER consists of gas turbines and renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic systems and wind turbines.Better bidding strategies,prepared by MG operators,decrease the electricity cost and emissions from upstream grid and conventional and renewable energy sources(RES).But it is inefficient due to the very high sporadic characteristics of RES and the very high outage rate.To solve these issues,this study suggests non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm Ⅱ(NSGA-Ⅱ)for an optimal bidding strategy considering pumped hydroelectric energy storage and DRP based on outage conditions and uncertainties of renewable energy sources.The uncertainty related to solar and wind units is modeled using lognormal and Weibull probability distributions.TOU-based DRP is used,especially considering the time of outages along with the time of peak loads and prices,to enhance the reliability of MG and reduce costs and emissions.

Analysis of the Quantity and Causes of Outages in LV/MV Electric Grids

The paper considers the quantity and causes of outages in electric grids of low and medium voltages using the example of an electric grid of a regional power supply company.The main types of damage to the equipment of power lines and transformer substations were identified.Data on other areas of rural and urban electric grids are also analyzed.The main directions for reducing the quantity of outages in electric grids are proposed based on this analysis.Among them,there are the use of isolated wires in power transmission lines,the improvement of design of switching devices,switches and terminals of transformers,the application of technical condition diagnostics,the disaggregating of power lines and the increase of protection sensitivity of power lines.Most of the causes of equipment damage can be prevented by increasing the maintenance level of this equipment.

Intelligent Assessment of Active and ReactivePower Flow with Satisfying Accuracy forN-k_(1)-k_(2) Cascading Outages

Addressed to the N-k_(1)-k_(2) cascading outages,it is computationally burdensome for the reliable calculation of active and reactive power flows.This paper builds a comprehensive framework with three algorithms,including the distribution factor(DF),the Newton-Raphson(NR),and the first iteration of NR algorithm(termed as 1J).Classifiers are designed to determine whether the NR algorithm should be employed for accuracy.Classifier features are extracted upon the analytical error of 1J.As reactive power is partially considered in the 1J but neglected in the DF algorithm,the deviation between the solutions is taken as one crucial feature.The support vector machine(SVM)is then utilized for classifier training.As the deep integration of the causal inference and the statistical paradigm,this framework calculates active and reactive power flows rapidly,reliably,and robustly.The effectiveness and robustness are fully validated in three typical IEEE systems.

Mapping near-real-time power outages from social media

Social media,including Twitter,has become an important source for disaster response.Yet most studies focus on a very limited amount of geotagged data(approximately 1%of all tweets)while discarding a rich body of data that contains location expressions in text.Location information is crucial to understanding the impact of disasters,including where damage has occurred and where the people who need help are situated.In this paper,we propose a novel two-stage machine learningand deep learning-based framework for power outage detection from Twitter.First,we apply a probabilistic classification model using bag-ofngrams features to find true power outage tweets.Second,we implement a new deep learning method-bidirectional long short-term memory networks-to extract outage locations from text.Results show a promising classification accuracy(86%)in identifying true power outage tweets,and approximately 20 times more usable tweets can be located compared with simply relying on geotagged tweets.The method of identifying location names used in this paper does not require language-or domain-specific external resources such as gazetteers or handcrafted features,so it can be extended to other situational awareness analyzes and new applications.

U.S. Resilience to large-scale power outages in 2002–2019

Prolonged power outages debilitate the economy and threaten public health. Existing research is generally limitedin its scope to a single event, an outage cause, or a region. Here, we provide one of the most comprehensiveanalyses of large-scale power outages in the U.S. from 2002 to 2019. This analysis is based on the outage datacollected under U.S. federal mandates that concern large blackouts, typically of transmission systems and excludemuch more common but smaller blackouts, typically, of distribution systems. We categorized the data into fouroutage causes and computed reliability metrics, which are commonly used for distribution-level small outagesonly but useful for analyzing large blackouts. Our spatiotemporal analysis reveals six of the most resilient U.S.states since 2010, improvement of power resilience against natural hazards in the south and northeast regions,and a disproportionately large number of human attacks for its population in the Western Electricity CoordinatingCouncil region. Our regression analysis identifies several statistically significant predictors and hypotheses forU.S. resilience to large blackouts. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework for analyzing outage data usingdifferential weighting and influential points to better understand power resilience. We share curated data andcode as Supplementary Materials.

Secure Transmission in Cognitive Radio Networks Using Full-Duplex Technique with Outdated CSI

This paper investigates the effects of the outdated channel state information(CSI)on the secrecy performance of an underlay spectrum sharing cognitive radio networks(CRNs),where the secondary user(SU)source node(Alice)aims to transmit the trusted messages to the full-duplex(FD)aided SU receiver(Bob)with the assistance of cooperative relay(Relay).Considering the impact of feedback delay,outdated CSI will aggravate the system performance.To tackle such challenge,the collaborative zero-forcing beamforming(ZFB)scheme of FD technique is further introduced to implement jamming so as to confuse the eavesdropping and improve the security performance of the system.Under such setup,the exact and asymptotic expressions of the secrecy outage probability(SOP)under the outdated CSI case are derived,respectively.The results reveal that i)the outdated CSI of the SU transmission channel will decrease the diversity gain from min(NANR,NRNB)to NRwith NA,NRand NBbeing the number of antennas of Alice,Relay and Bob,respectively,ii)the introduction of FD technique can improve coding gain and enhance system performance.

Exploiting the Direct Link in IRS Assisted NOMA Networks with Hardware Impairments

Hardware impairments(HI)are always present in low-cost wireless devices.This paper investigates the outage behaviors of intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)assisted non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA)networks by taking into account the impact of HI.Specifically,we derive the approximate and asymptotic expressions of the outage probability for the IRS-NOMA-HI networks.Based on the asymptotic results,the diversity orders under perfect self-interference cancellation and imperfect self-interference cancellation scenarios are obtained to evaluate the performance of the considered network.In addition,the system throughput of IRS-NOMA-HI is discussed in delay-limited mode.The obtained results are provided to verify the accuracy of the theoretical analyses and reveal that:1)The outage performance and system throughput for IRS-NOMA-HI outperforms that of the IRS-assisted orthogonal multiple access-HI(IRS-OMA-HI)networks;2)The number of IRS elements,the pass loss factors,the Rician factors,and the value of HI are pivotal to enhancing the performance of IRS-NOMAHI networks;and 3)It is recommended that effective methods of reducing HI should be used to ensure system performance,in addition to self-interference cancellation techniques.

Performance Analysis of RIS Assisted NOMA Networks over Rician Fading Channels

In this paper,we consider a downlink non-orthogonal multiple access(NOMA)network assisted by two reconfigurable intelligent surfaces(RISs)over Rician fading channels,in which each user communicates with the base station by the virtue of a RIS to enhance the reliability of the received signal.To evaluate the system performance of our proposed RIS-NOMA network,we first derive the exact and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability and ergodic rate of two users.Then,we derive the exact and asymptotic upper bound expressions for the ergodic rate of the nearby user.Based on asymptotic analytical results,the diversity orders for the outage probability and the high signal-to-noise ratio(SNR)slopes for the ergodic rate of the two users are obtained in the high SNR regime.Moreover,we derive the system throughputs of the proposed RIS-NOMA network in delay-limited and delay-tolerant transmission modes.Numerical results confirm our analysis and demonstrate that:1)The outage probability and ergodic rate of RIS-NOMA networks are superior to that of RIS-assisted orthogonalmultiple access(OMA)networks;2)The RIS-NOMA networks have ability to achieve a larger system throughput compared to RIS-OMA networks;and 3)The system performance of RIS-NOMA networks can be significantly improved as the number of reflecting elements and Rician factor increases.

Outage Behaviors of Active Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enabled NOMA Communications

Active intelligent reflecting surface(IRS)is a novel and promising technology that is able to overcome the multiplicative fading introduced by passive IRS.In this paper,we consider the application of active IRS to nonorthogonalmultiple access(NOMA)networks,where the incident signals are amplified actively through integrating amplifier to reflecting elements.More specifically,the performance of active/passive IRS-NOMA networks is investigated over large and small-scale fading channels.Aiming to characterize the performance of active IRSNOMA networks,the exact and asymptotic expressions of outage probability for a couple of users,i.e.,near-end user n and far-end user m are derived by exploiting a 1-bit coding scheme.Based on approximated analyses,the diversity orders of user n and user m are obtained for active IRS-NOMA.In addition,the system throughput of active IRS-NOMA is discussed in the delay-sensitive transmission.The simulation results are carried out to verify that:i)The outage behaviors of active IRS-NOMAnetworks are superior to that of passive IRS-NOMAnetworks;ii)As the reflection amplitude factors increase,the active IRS-NOMAnetworks are capable of furnishing the enhanced outage performance;and iii)The active IRS-NOMA has a larger system throughput than passive IRS-NOMA and conventional communications.

Performance Analysis in SWIPT-Based Bidirectional D2D Communications in Cellular Networks

In this paper,a novel traffic-aware cooperative cognitive radio network that can enable deviceto-device(D2D)communications in cellular system is proposed and investigated.By providing relay cooperation to cellular transmission,D2D users can realize their own two-way communication in the licensed spectrum.Unlike most existing works,in the proposed network,both wireless-powered D2D users can harvest energy via radio-frequency signals received from basic station(BS)through a hybrid protocol which can adaptively utilize both time-switching and powersplitting techniques.Specifically,D2D users perform decode-and-forward operation to transmit signals,and mobile user(MU)employs a selection combining technique.In addition,the performance of both D2D system and cellular system in the proposed network is evaluated by deriving the expressions of their exact outage probability and throughput.Numerical and simulation results validate correctness of derivations and reveal the influence of various system parameters of the proposed network.

System Outage Probability and Diversity Analysis of a SWIPT Based Two-Way DF Relay Network Under Transceiver Hardware Impairments

This paper investigates the system outage performance of a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer(SWIPT)based two-way decodeand-forward(DF)relay network,where potential hardware impairments(HIs)in all transceivers are considered.After harvesting energy and decoding messages simultaneously via a power splitting scheme,the energy-limited relay node forwards the decoded information to both terminals.Each terminal combines the signals from the direct and relaying links via selection combining.We derive the system outage probability under independent but non-identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels.It reveals an overall system ceiling(OSC)effect,i.e.,the system falls in outage if the target rate exceeds an OSC threshold that is determined by the levels of HIs.Furthermore,we derive the diversity gain of the considered network.The result reveals that when the transmission rate is below the OSC threshold,the achieved diversity gain equals the sum of the shape parameter of the direct link and the smaller shape parameter of the terminalto-relay links;otherwise,the diversity gain is zero.This is different from the amplify-and-forward(AF)strategy,under which the relaying links have no contribution to the diversity gain.Simulation results validate the analytical results and reveal that compared with the AF strategy,the SWIPT based two-way relaying links under the DF strategy are more robust to HIs and achieve a lower system outage probability.