Intentional controlled islanding aims to split the power system into self-sustainable islands after a severe disturbance, but prior the uncontrolled network separation. Given its nature (i.e. last resort for blackout prevention), this emergency control technique must be adopted as quickly as possible. This paper proposes a computationally efficient method based on graph reduction and spectral clustering. The paper contributes by describing important details of the graph reduction process in the context of controlled islanding and by the formalisation of this process. Furthermore, it demonstrates how to adopt embedded graphs to enhance the Multiway Spectral Clustering graph partitioning. Finally, it is shown how to explicitly incorporate important cannot-link constrains between coherent generator groups into the islanding problem. The proposed method is detailed using the IEEE 39-bus test case. To evaluate the algorithm performance, the method is applied to realistically-sized PEGASE test networks @en

Partitioning of electric networks into zones or areas is a procedure that has numerous applications in power system planning, operation and control. Spectral clustering based approaches are among the most favoured ones to solve the partitioning problem. Applications of spectral clustering include definition of control zones, analysis of connectivity structure of power networks, intentional controlled islanding, design of sectionalising strategies, and visualisation. Although spectral clustering is a state-of-the-art family of methods with numerous extensions, some practical issues can arise when applying it to large-scale power networks. While spectral clustering becomes significantly more robust to outliers when combined with a robust post-processing method like k-medoids, the connectedness of the resulting partitioning cannot be guaranteed. This paper proposes a greedy algorithm to solve the connectedness issues inherent to many robust post-processing methods. Furthermore, it is proposed to utilise a label propagation based heuristic to improve the quality of the final partitions. The test results evaluate the steps of the methodology on a large-scale 1354-bus PEGASE test network.

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