Sharif Digital Repository

Many smart grid applications need broadcast communications. Because of the critical role of the broadcasted messages in these applications, their authentication is very important to prevent message forgery attacks. Smart grid consists of plenty of low-resource devices such as smart meters or phasor measurement units (PMUs) that are located in physically unprotected environments. Therefore, the storage and computational constraints of these devices as well as their security against physical attacks must be considered in designing broadcast authentication schemes. In this paper, we consider two communication models based on the resources of the broadcasters and receivers and propose a physical... 

A better performance and consequently the widespread use of polymeric insulators in different parts of the power grid can increase their role in the grid reliability. The accumulation of contamination and housing-erosion are the two most effective factors in undermining the performance of this type of insulators. Therefore, electric utilities need to identify contaminated insulators for washing and cracks in polymeric housing to replace them with healthy specimens. This paper discusses the impact of contamination layer and housing-erosion of polymeric insulators on the partial discharges (PD) at the insulator surface, through RF-PRPD (phase resolved partial discharge) patterns. The existence... 

With the proliferation of intermittent renewable energy sources, power systems need to withstand an increasing number of disturbances that may affect system frequency. In this paper, we focus on the effects of high penetration level of wind turbine-generators (WTG) on the power system operational planning from the frequency point of view. Specifically, an exact formulation for the minimum frequency calculation is presented to increase accuracy and speed of analyses. Then, the effect of WTG's frequency response on the power system frequency stability is investigated to compute the maximum acceptable generation outage as a function of penetration level. Finally, as an application to power... 

With the introduction of restructuring concepts to traditional power systems, a great deal of attention is given to utilization of distributed generation. Integration of DG units has been known as an alternative for distribution network reinforcement and purchasing energy from transmission network. Considering these facts, in the planning procedure of DG, determination of optimal sizing and sitting is a very important issue. This work presents a comprehensive framework for integration of distributed generations into a distribution network, regarding various technical and economical issues such as reduction of active power losses, environmental pollutions, investment and running costs while... 

Reliability assessment is of primary importance in designing and planning distribution systems that operate in an economical manner with minimal interruption of customer loads. Distributed generation (DG) is expected to play an increasing role in emerging power systems because they use different type of resources and technologies to serve energy to power systems. DG is expected to improve the system reliability as its backup generation. Since DG units are subject to failures as all other generation units, the random behavior of these units must be taken into account in the analysis. Existence of DG units in a distribution system will effect on restoration time of load points. In this paper,... 

This paper presents several techniques for the processing of power system signals in a power system setup. The techniques exhibit a desirable performance against signal pollutions such as noise and distortions, signal unbalance (in three-phase applications), and Variations in the signal attributes (mainly its frequency). These features render them a promising set of options for modern power systems in which all or some of these undesired factors may be amplified depending on the case. Single-phase and three-phase applications are both examined and appropriate techniques are suggested for different scenarios. © 2007 IEEE  

Smart grid plays an important role in managing demand response management in modern smart city using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In smart grid environment, sensors are widely used for surveillance. These are deployed on the high tension power supply lines which help to share the information to control center about line breakage or any other flaw. Besides the cyber-attacks, sensors may also experience physical attacks as they are deployed on high-tension power lines in an open environment. Moreover, an attacker can also impersonate the information exchanged between sensors, gateways and control centers. Therefore, the most indispensable requirement is to prevent these... 

Extreme weather events can devastate parts of power grids. Thus, the appropriate post-disaster reaction is a crucial duty for power utilities. To address this important concern, a new two-stage framework is proposed in this paper. Stage I optimally coordinates disaster mutual assistance between affected and supporting utilities. To this end, distance between the damaged and supporting utilities, extent of damage, and repair resources are taken into consideration as decision criteria. Then, a novel formulation in the form of mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is developed for mutual aid management problem. The results of stage I are used as inputs to stage II. A new multi-horizon... 

The concept of energy hub has been used recently to study multi-carrier energy systems. A model has been proposed in this paper for planning multi-hub energy system considering the competition between the hubs. The energy hubs are interconnected by a power grid. Hubs supply the demands for heat and electricity using various technologies and access to several energy carriers. To this aim, load zones were used to incorporate demand profiles for both heat and electricity in the different seasons of the year. Supplying the demand most cost-effectively is the objective function of each hub. These hubs select the optimum strategy separately in a competitive space. The power grid is owned by... 

The number of harmonic-producing sources is rapidly growing in the power grid due to the increased penetration of power electronic-interfaced resources (such as wind turbines, photovoltaic systems, and energy storage units) and proliferation of nonlinear loads. Many researchers have investigated the effects of non-sinusoidal waveforms on the performance of different types of protective relays, and have reported some harmonic-related malfunctions. This paper presents a detailed Markov model that captures different impacts of harmonics on the reliability of overcurrent relays. In addition to addressing relevant considerations of the previous reliability models, this model accounts for new... 

This paper introduces a new concept that we call smart transmission expansion planning (TEP) based on unconventional high surge impedance Loading (HSIL) line designs that will revolutionize power delivery. To date, these two areas (TEP and transmission line design) have been conducted separately. For TEP, planners use the electrical parameters of a few standard conventional line designs to study planning scenarios, and then, the final candidate line is constructed. In such a sequence, cost-effective scenarios often do not meet the technical criteria of load flow. This paper will demonstrate that this sequence can be overturned; namely, a transmission expansion planner can get optimal line... 

Cooperative cloud providers in the form of cloud federations can potentially reduce their energy costs by exploiting electricity price fluctuations across different locations. In this environment, on the one hand, the electricity price has a significant influence on the federations formed, and, thus, on the profit earned by the cloud providers, and on the other hand, the cloud cooperation has an inevitable impact on the performance of the smart grid. In this regard, the interaction between independent cloud providers and the smart grid is modeled as a two-stage Stackelberg game interleaved with a coalitional game in this article. In this game, in the first stage the smart grid, as a leader... 

Time synchronization is one of the main issues for guaranteeing the correctness of actions depending on the time of measured data or detected events by electronic devices across industrial networks. According to the accuracy needed in different applications and networks, several synchronization protocols or algorithms have been proposed so far. The Precision Time Protocol, PTP, is one of the most accurate synchronization protocols introduced for automation applications. It has also been used in power grids and digital substations. However, due to the variety of cyber-attacks in electrical power systems in recent years, its security should be considered and evaluated as other substation... 

One of the most used types of auctions in the smart grid is the double auction, in which both buyers and sellers can respectively submit their bids and asks to participate in the auction. In recent years, many schemes have been designed to propose a double auction mechanism for the smart grids; however, few of these schemes consider the information security aspects and users’ privacy. In this paper, we propose a protocol that helps different double auction mechanisms be implemented securely in the smart grids. This protocol not only can satisfy the security requirements of a double auction scheme but is also compatible with the smart grid technologies. In this scheme, in order to preserve... 

Protection systems play a major role in the performance of electric power systems. There are a number of techniques such as redundancy within the relay system or local and remote backup methods to improve protection system reliability to remove faults as fast as possible, coordination of protective relays is very important. Also availability to neighboring systems affects significantly on repair time after occurring an event. An approach is presented in this paper to incorporate relay coordination and alternative supply availability on radial sub-transmission system reliability. For this purpose, a computer program has been developed. As a case study, a practical 63 KV sub-transmission... 

The widespread presence of contingent generation, when coupled with the resulting volatility of the chronological net-load (i.e., the difference between stochastic generation and uncertain load) in today's modern electricity markets, engender the significant operational risks of an uncertain sufficiency of flexible energy capacity. In this article, we address several operational flexibility concerns that originate from the increase in generation variability captured within a security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) formulation in smart grids. To quantitatively assess the power grid operational flexibility capacity, we first introduce two reference operation strategies based on a two-stage... 

High penetration of Power Electronic (PE) converters in DC power grids causes new stability challenges due to dynamic interactions among the subsystems of a network. Such dynamic interactions can be avoided by the impedance coordination among the subsystems through the modification of control loops or passive elements inside a grid. Impedance coordination is a very complex and time-consuming task with no adaptations to dynamic changes in a power grid. The current study delved into the concepts of dynamic interaction and passivity and they were combined to provide an online stability measure concerning the DC bus impedance characteristics. In this regard, a novel DC Power System Stabilizer... 

In this paper, a model for the optimal placement of contingency-constrained phasor measurement units (PMUs) in electric power networks is presented. The conventional complete observability of power networks is first formulated and then, different contingency conditions in power networks including measurement losses and line outages are added to the main model. The communication constraints which would limit the maximum number of measurements associated with each installed PMU is considered as measurement limitations. The relevant formulations are also proposed to make the model more comprehensive. The IEEE standard test systems are examined for the applicability of proposed model. The... 

This paper presents a new approach based on multi leader follower game in order to find the optimal contract price of distributed generation in distribution network considering competition among them. The leader problems correspond to the independent DG units who decide to maximize the individual profits, while the follower problem refers to the distribution company (DisCo) which seeks the minimization of the payments incurred in attending the expected demand while satisfying network constraints. Disco can purchase energy either from the transmission network through the substations or from the DG units within its network. The DisCo minimization problem acts as a constraint into the each DG... 

In this paper, the participation of wind farms in load frequency control (LFC) is studied. A previously proposed macromodel for the wind farm is employed to regulate its output power. The wind farm including its proposed control strategy is incorporated into the conventional LFC model. The proposed LFC structure is able to dynamically maintain the system frequency at the nominal value against the power imbalances. To achieve proper transient response, the integral control parameter of the LFC controller is optimized using the genetic algorithm (GA). To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, several simulation case studies are carried out. The results show that the wind farm can...