Post-contingency corrective control failure: A risk to neglect or a risk to control?

This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the risk implied by the potential failure of post-contingency corrective controls. We express such risk in terms of service interruption socio-economic severity to the system end-consumers and argue for considering its magnitude not only in absolute terms, but most importantly in relation to a spectrum of socioeconomic metrics fully describing the operation of an electrical power system as per the applicable reliability management approach (presently based on the N-l criterion). We showcase the proposed methodology by presenting its application through case studies on the single area version of the IEEE-RTS96 benchmark. Our analysis establishes that the proposed assessment scope is quite informative in distinguishing whether the risk implied by the potential failure of post-contingency corrective control is noteworthy or negligible. © 2018 IEEE.