Abstract and subjects
Higher variability in grid conditions, resulting from growing renewable penetration and increased incidence of extreme weather events, has increased the difficulty of screening for scenarios that may lead to catastrophic cascading failures. Traditional power-flow-based tools for assessing cascading blackout risk are too slow to properly explore the space of possible failures and load/generation patterns. We add to the growing literature of faster graph-neural-network (GNN)-based techniques, developing two novel techniques for the estimation of blackout magnitude from initial grid conditions. First we propose several methods for employing an initial classification step to filter out safe ‘non-blackout’ scenarios prior to magnitude estimation. Second, using insights from the statistical properties of cascading blackouts, we propose a method for facilitating non-local message-passing in our GNN models. We validate these two approaches on a large simulated dataset, and show the potential of both to increase blackout size estimation performance.
•Graph neural networks can estimate cascading blackout size from initial grid state.•The fast inference of machine-learning models can enable rapid scenario screening.•Statistical augmentation of graph input topology can increase estimation accuracy.•A pre-regression classification step can also increase estimation accuracy.