Computational Toolbox for Power System Stability Assessment and Certification

Power system is the largest, and one of the most complex machines ever built by humans. Due to inherent nature of power flows it lacks global stability and is naturally "fragile". Large enough disturbances may cause the loss of stability and trigger the cascading failures resulting in major blackouts. Aggressive introduction of renewable generation increases the overall stress of the system, so the stability constraints will likely become the main barrier for transition to clean energy sources. Despite many decades of research, stability assessment is still the most computationally intensive task in power grid operation process. In my talk I will present several strategies for assessment of stability mainly based on semidefinite programming approaches. First, I will discuss the Lyapunov Function Family technique for characterization of the region of attraction and synthesis of optimal remedial actions executed in emergency situation. I will then briefly describe the certificate for robust small-signal stability in a presence of load dynamics uncertainty. The talk will conclude with our recent results on the stability constrained design principles of ad-hoc DC microgrids with uncertain network topology.
Konstantin (Kostya) Turitsyn received his Ph.D. degree in physics from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Moscow, in 2007. Currently, he holds a Skolkovo Foundation Career Development Assistant Professor position in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. Before joining MIT, he was Kadanoff-Rice fellow in University of Chicago and Oppenheimer fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research interests encompass a broad range of problems related to development of novel mathematical tools for analysis of large-scale nonlinear and stochastic systems. These tools have been applied to problems arising in different domains, most importantly in the fields of statistical physics, optics, fluid mechanics and more recently power systems.