Reasons behind this project

In the context of the energy transition, the power grid must cope with more and more uncertainties and volatility on the power injections and withdrawals. It must adapt in real time to rapidly changing conditions while ensuring an acceptable level of reliability.
To maintain the system in its secured operation domain, the operator has some levers that can be activated preventively or after the occurrence of a disturbance: one consists of changing the power injections/withdrawals – which has an impact on the producers and consumers and is therefore costly; the other consists of re-configuring the grid by acting on the switching devices which has the huge benefit of being costless.
TSO are interested in new tools that would support the operator in finding adequate grid configuration (topology) that:
• ensure a defined level of reliability over a short-term time horizon (from real time to few hours),
• respect some constraints (limited number of simultaneous modifications, minimum time interval between two modifications of the same device. . .),
• provide a set of simple conditional rules that could be applied by the operator after a disturbance to quickly find a grid configuration.

Project objectives

Scaling up the solving of the Transmission Network Switching problem. As the problem is rapidly intractable, the goal is to develop approaches to find relevant solutions on real-size operational grids.

The technical approach consists in:

• improving the problem formulation to better reflect operational decision making
• combining optimisation techniques and machine learning approaches.

Project members

OptGrid is a PhD work supervised by TU Delft and sponsored by RTE.

Project deliverables

coming soon!