Physics-Based and Data-Driven Analytics for Enhanced Planning and Operations in Power Systems with Deep Renewable Penetration

This dissertation is motivated by the lack of combined physics-based and data-driven framework for solving power system challenges that are introduced by the integration of new devices and new system components. As increasing number of stochastic generation, responsive loads, and dynamic measurements are involved in the planning and operations of modern power systems, utilities and system operators are in great need of new analysis framework that could combine physical models and measuring data together for solving challenging planning and operational problems. In view of the above challenges, the high-level objective of this dissertation is to develop a framework for integrating measurement data into large physical systems modeled by dynamical equations. To this end, the dissertation first identifies four critical tasks for the planning and operations of the modern power systems: the data collection and pre-processing, the system situational awareness, the decision making process, as well as the post-event analysis. The dissertation then takes one concrete application in each of these critical tasks as the example, and proposes the physics-based/data-driven approach for solving the challenging problems faced by this specific application. To this end, this dissertation focuses on solving the following specific problems using physics-based/data-driven approaches. First, for the data collection and pre-processing platform, a purely data-driven approach is proposed to detect bad metering data in the phasor measurement unit (PMU) monitoring systems, and ensure the overall PMU data quality. Second, for the situational awareness platform, a physics-based voltage stability assessment method is presented to improve the situational awareness of system voltage instabilities. Third, for the decision making platform, a combined physics-based and data-driven framework is proposed to support the decision making process of PMU-based power plant model validation. Forth, for the post-event analysis platform, a physics-based post-event analysis is presented to identify the root causes of the sub-synchronous oscillations induced by the wind farm integration. The above problems and proposed solutions are discussed in detail in Section 2 through Section 5. The results of this work can be integrated to address practical problems in modern power system planning and operations

Advanced Wide-Area Monitoring System Design, Implementation, and Application

Wide-area monitoring systems (WAMSs) provide an unprecedented way to collect, store and analyze ultra-high-resolution synchrophasor measurements to improve the dynamic observability in power grids. This dissertation focuses on designing and implementing a wide-area monitoring system and a series of applications to assist grid operators with various functionalities. The contributions of this dissertation are below: First, a synchrophasor data collection system is developed to collect, store, and forward GPS-synchronized, high-resolution, rich-type, and massive-volume synchrophasor data. a distributed data storage system is developed to store the synchrophasor data. A memory-based cache system is discussed to improve the efficiency of real-time situation awareness. In addition, a synchronization system is developed to synchronize the configurations among the cloud nodes. Reliability and Fault-Tolerance of the developed system are discussed. Second, a novel lossy synchrophasor data compression approach is proposed. This section first introduces the synchrophasor data compression problem, then proposes a methodology for lossy data compression, and finally presents the evaluation results. The feasibility of the proposed approach is discussed. Third, a novel intelligent system, SynchroService, is developed to provide critical functionalities for a synchrophasor system. Functionalities including data query, event query, device management, and system authentication are discussed. Finally, the resiliency and the security of the developed system are evaluated. Fourth, a series of synchrophasor-based applications are developed to utilize the high-resolution synchrophasor data to assist power system engineers to monitor the performance of the grid as well as investigate the root cause of large power system disturbances. Lastly, a deep learning-based event detection and verification system is developed to provide accurate event detection functionality. This section introduces the data preprocessing, model design, and performance evaluation. Lastly, the implementation of the developed system is discussed

Vulnerability Assessment and Privacy-preserving Computations in Smart Grid

Modern advances in sensor, computing, and communication technologies enable various smart grid applications which highlight the vulnerability that requires novel approaches to the field of cybersecurity. While substantial numbers of technologies have been adopted to protect cyber attacks in smart grid, there lacks a comprehensive review of the implementations, impacts, and solutions of cyber attacks specific to the smart grid.In this dissertation, we are motivated to evaluate the security requirements for the smart grid which include three main properties: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. First, we review the cyber-physical security of the synchrophasor network, which highlights all three aspects of security issues. Taking the synchrophasor network as an example, we give an overview of how to attack a smart grid network. We test three types of attacks and show the impact of each attack consisting of denial-of-service attack, sniffing attack, and false data injection attack.Next, we discuss how to protect against each attack. For protecting availability, we examine possible defense strategies for the associated vulnerabilities.For protecting data integrity, a small-scale prototype of secure synchrophasor network is presented with different cryptosystems. Besides, a deep learning based time-series anomaly detector is proposed to detect injected measurement. Our approach observes both data measurements and network traffic features to jointly learn system states and can detect attacks when state vector estimator fails.For protecting data confidentiality, we propose privacy-preserving algorithms for two important smart grid applications. 1) A distributed privacy-preserving quadratic optimization algorithm to solve Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) problem. The SCOPF problem is decomposed into small subproblems using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and gradient projection algorithms. 2) We use Paillier cryptosystem to secure the computation of the power system dynamic simulation. The IEEE 3-Machine 9-Bus System is used to implement and demonstrate the proposed scheme. The security and performance analysis of our implementations demonstrate that our algorithms can prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks at a reasonable cost

Image Embedding of PMU Data for Deep Learning towards Transient Disturbance Classification

This paper presents a study on power grid disturbance classification by Deep Learning (DL). A real synchrophasor set composing of three different types of disturbance events from the Frequency Monitoring Network (FNET) is used. An image embedding technique called Gramian Angular Field is applied to transform each time series of event data to a two-dimensional image for learning. Two main DL algorithms, i.e. CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) and RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) are tested and compared with two widely used data mining tools, the Support Vector Machine and Decision Tree. The test results demonstrate the superiority of the both DL algorithms over other methods in the application of power system transient disturbance classification.Comment: An updated version of this manuscript has been accepted by the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Energy Internet (ICEI), Beijing, Chin

Event and Intrusion Detection Systems for Cyber-Physical Power Systems

High speed data from Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) with Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) enables real and non-real time monitoring and control of power systems. The information and communication infrastructure used in WAMS efficiently transports information but introduces cyber security vulnerabilities. Adversaries may exploit such vulnerabilities to create cyber-attacks against the electric power grid. Control centers need to be updated to be resilient not only to well-known power system contingencies but also to cyber-attacks. Therefore, a combined event and intrusion detection systems (EIDS) is required that can provide precise classification for optimal response. This dissertation describes a WAMS cyber-physical power system test bed that was developed to generate datasets and perform cyber-physical power system research related to cyber-physical system vulnerabilities, cyber-attack impact studies, and machine learning algorithms for EIDS. The test bed integrates WAMS components with a Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) with hardware in the loop (HIL) and includes various sized power systems with a wide variety of implemented power system and cyber-attack scenarios. This work developed a novel data processing and compression method to address the WAMS big data problem. The State Tracking and Extraction Method (STEM) tracks system states from measurements and creates a compressed sequence of states for each observed scenario. Experiments showed STEM reduces data size significantly without losing key event information in the dataset that is useful to train EIDS and classify events. Two EIDS are proposed and evaluated in this dissertation. Non-Nested Generalized Exemplars (NNGE) is a rule based classifier that creates rules in the form of hyperrectangles to classify events. NNGE uses rule generalization to create a model that has high accuracy and fast classification time. Hoeffding adaptive trees (HAT) is a decision tree classifier and uses incremental learning which is suitable for data stream mining. HAT creates decision trees on the fly from limited number of instances, uses low memory, has fast evaluation time, and adapts to concept changes. The experiments showed NNGE and HAT with STEM make effective EIDS that have high classification accuracy, low false positives, low memory usage, and fast classification times

Application of Advanced Early Warning Systems with Adaptive Protection

This project developed and field-tested two methods of Adaptive Protection systems utilizing synchrophasor data. One method detects conditions of system stress that can lead to unintended relay operation, and initiates a supervisory signal to modify relay response in real time to avoid false trips. The second method detects the possibility of false trips of impedance relays as stable system swings “encroach” on the relays’ impedance zones, and produces an early warning so that relay engineers can re-evaluate relay settings. In addition, real-time synchrophasor data produced by this project was used to develop advanced visualization techniques for display of synchrophasor data to utility operators and engineers

Event and Intrusion Detection Systems for Cyber-Physical Power Systems

High speed data from Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS) with Phasor Measurement Units (PMU) enables real and non-real time monitoring and control of power systems. The information and communication infrastructure used in WAMS efficiently transports information but introduces cyber security vulnerabilities. Adversaries may exploit such vulnerabilities to create cyber-attacks against the electric power grid. Control centers need to be updated to be resilient not only to well-known power system contingencies but also to cyber-attacks. Therefore, a combined event and intrusion detection systems (EIDS) is required that can provide precise classification for optimal response. This dissertation describes a WAMS cyber-physical power system test bed that was developed to generate datasets and perform cyber-physical power system research related to cyber-physical system vulnerabilities, cyber-attack impact studies, and machine learning algorithms for EIDS. The test bed integrates WAMS components with a Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) with hardware in the loop (HIL) and includes various sized power systems with a wide variety of implemented power system and cyber-attack scenarios. This work developed a novel data processing and compression method to address the WAMS big data problem. The State Tracking and Extraction Method (STEM) tracks system states from measurements and creates a compressed sequence of states for each observed scenario. Experiments showed STEM reduces data size significantly without losing key event information in the dataset that is useful to train EIDS and classify events. Two EIDS are proposed and evaluated in this dissertation. Non-Nested Generalized Exemplars (NNGE) is a rule based classifier that creates rules in the form of hyperrectangles to classify events. NNGE uses rule generalization to create a model that has high accuracy and fast classification time. Hoeffding adaptive trees (HAT) is a decision tree classifier and uses incremental learning which is suitable for data stream mining. HAT creates decision trees on the fly from limited number of instances, uses low memory, has fast evaluation time, and adapts to concept changes. The experiments showed NNGE and HAT with STEM make effective EIDS that have high classification accuracy, low false positives, low memory usage, and fast classification times