Towards smart corrective switching: analysis and advancement of PJM's switching solutions

Transmission switching, as a power flow control mechanism that can reduce costs and improve reliability, has gained a lot of attention during the last decade. Despite its benefits, industry adoption has been very limited due to its computational complexity, stability and AC performance concerns. Pennsylvania New Jersey Maryland (PJM) has published a list of corrective switching solutions to relieve actual and post-contingency network violations. The list is developed based on operators’ prior knowledge and offline studies. This study employs a fast AC-based real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) tool with corrective transmission switching (CTS) functionality to analyse PJM's switching solutions with actual PJM data. The results show that the RTCA CTS tool is almost always able to find solutions that perform better than, or equally as well as, PJM's solutions. The results also show that PJM's list identifies solutions for only 3% of the problematic contingencies with post-contingency violations over the course of one week. The RTCA CTS tool, however, is able to find corrective TS solutions for almost all the cases. The results suggest that CTS is ripe for industry adoption. The tool provides significant savings and would pave the road towards a smarter transmission network as an essential ingredient of the future smart grid.