Space Weather Impact on the Northern Portion of the European Interconnected Power Transmission System

Geomagnetic storms (GMS) can inject geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) into high voltage power transmission grids, causing instabilities and eventually leading the grid to collapse. Since GMS are expected to cause more pronounced disturbances at high latitudes, we consider the effects of extreme GMS on the northern portion of the 400 kV interconnected European power transmission grid, which includes Finland, Sweden and Norway. Potential space-weather triggered voltage instabilities in the power grid were analyzed considering mono-phase transformers, which are known to be more vulnerable to GIC injection, and three phase transformers, which are less vulnerable. Our simulations show that for the three-phase configuration of the network, the likelihood of grid collapse is very low, compared to the mono-phase configuration, and collapse only occurs with extremely high geoelectric field intensities. Transmission lines of the system that experience higher reactive power losses during normal operation are more likely to increase losses during a GMS event. In our study, we identified the portion of the Scandinavian interconnected power transmission where the highest reactive losses in transmission lines and in voltage magnitudes are observed. This corresponds to the southern parts of Sweden and Norway.

PICCINELLI Roberta;  KRAUSMANN Elisabeth; 

2016-08-04

National Technical University of Athens, GREECE

JRC101031

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC101031,