Cascade Failures Analyses Improving Resilience on Transmission Expansion Planning

In every critical infrastructure system, unexpected events and outages have the potential to cause massive impacts, affecting people and the economy, such as in the power power grid blackouts. To avoid similar incidents in the future, extensive research is necessary to improve resilience and reliability of power grids. This work presents a Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) model that confronts the largely adopted deterministic security criteria N-1 versus an AC-Cascade Failure Model (AC-CFM) analysis. The main goal is to highlight the importance of cascade failure analysis to increase power system resilience. Tests over the NREL-118 system verify the AC-CFM coupling in TEP models, demonstrating its benefits for assuming a risky proneness behavior for reaching long-term power grid resilience.