Controlled islanding for a hybrid AC/DC grid with VSC-HVDC using semi-supervised spectral clustering

Abstract: As the last resort of emergency control, controlled islanding is an effective means of preventing fault-propagation and a system-wide blackout. However, conventional AC transmission lines are unavailable to be employed for power exchange between these islands. To make full use of the DC power modulation capability of VSC-HVDC links, a new controlled islanding model is put forward for an AC/VSC-HVDC hybrid grid to minimize the composite power-flow disruption, in which the DC-terminals belonging to a VSC-HVDC link are placed in different islands. To solve this model, a semi-supervised spectral clustering-based approach is proposed by transforming the problem into a weighted undirected graph segmentation problem. The novelty of our work is to find an optimal islanding solution in real time such that the power exchanges between islands are implemented via a VSC-HVDC link to reduce the generation-load imbalance. The simulation results on the IEEE 39-bus system and a real-world system verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.