This website contains a repository of electric grid test cases for power flow, economics, dynamics, and geomagnetic disturbance analysis of power systems. Click here for all available power system cases. Most recent updates are listed below:
[9] A. B. Birchfield, T. Xu, and T. J. Overbye, “Power flow convergence and reactive power planning in the creation of large synthetic grids,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 2018.
[10] T. Xu, A. B. Birchfield and T. J. Overbye, “Modeling, Tuning and Validating System Dynamics in Synthetic Electric Grids,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 2018.
To encourage and support innovation, synthetic electric grids are fictional, designed systems that mimic the complexity of actual electric grids but contain no confidential information. In order to scale these systems to ten thousand buses or more, robust reactive power planning is needed, accounting for power flow convergence issues. [9] addresses reactive power planning and power flow convergence in the context of large synthetic power grids. Additional complexities can be added into synthetic models to widen their applications. Thus, [10] aims to extend synthetic network base cases for transient stability studies. An automated algorithm is proposed to assign appropriate models and parameters to each synthetic generator. A two-stage model tuning procedure is also proposed to improve synthetic dynamic models and several transient stability metrics are developed to validate the created dynamic cases. A complete list of publications is available here.
Several computer assignments using 37-bus and 2000-bus synthetic power system models are designed for one TAMU ECEN undergraduate course. Those assignments are used to help students gain experience and insights into different aspects in the power system area, including the power flow problem, energy economics, contingency analysis, transient stability studies and so on. You can download these cases and instructions here.
We developed a 10k-bus synthetic electric grid test case on the footprint of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. The image on the left contours the frequency variation across a synthetic 10,000 bus system following a generator loss contingency simulated in a transient stability package. This synthetic system was developed with support from the US ARPA-E Grid Data program. You can download the power flow case used to generate this movie including transient stability data here. More details, including the movie file are available here.
This video is made using a 2000 bus test case built on the footprint of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. A contingency event with a three-phase transmission line fault, followed by line tripping, is considered. Voltage variations are shown with and without the application of power system stabilizers. This synthetic system was developed with support from the US ARPA-E Grid Data program. You can download the power flow case used to generate this movie including transient stability data here. More details, including the movie file are available here.
This ACTIVSg2000 test case is a 2000-bus power system test case that is entirely synthetic, built from public information and a statistical analysis of real power systems. This case is built on the footprint of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. It has four voltage levels (500/230/161/115 kV) and a total generation capacity of 98 GW, a portion of which is committed to supply a load of 67 GW and 19 GVar. This synthetic system was developed with support from the US ARPA-E Grid Data program. Read More.
[6] A. B. Birchfield, E. Schweitzer, H. Athari, T. Xu, T. J. Overbye, A. Scaglione, and Z.Wang, “Validation metrics to assess the realism of synthetic power grids,” Energies, vol. 10, no. 8, p. 1233, Aug. 2017.
Building synthetic grid models for this purpose is a relatively new problem, for which a challenge is to show that created cases are sufficiently realistic. Paper [6] puts forth a validation process based on a set of metrics observed from actual power system cases. These metrics follow the structure, proportions, and parameters of key power system elements, which can be used in assessing and validating the quality of synthetic power grids. The process is applied to two new public test cases, which are shown to meet the criteria specified in the metrics of this paper. A complete list of publications is available here.
This case is built on the footprint of the western South Carolina, covering about 21 counties with around 2.6 million people. There are 90 generators in this case with a total generation capacity of about 12 GW. The synthetic system has two voltage levels (345/138 kV). This synthetic system was developed with support from the US ARPA-E Grid Data program. Read More.
This 200-bus case with two voltage levels (230/115 kV) is built on the footprint of Central Illinois, which represents one single area covering fourteen counties and 1.1 million people. This case contains 49 generators with a total capacity of 3543 MW and the load level is set at 2229 MW and 653 MVar. This synthetic system was developed with support from the US ARPA-E Grid Data program. Read More.