2013 3rd International Conference on Electric Power and Energy Conversion Systems, Yildiz Teclmical University, Istanbul, Turkey,

October 2-4,2013

Sensitivity Analysis for the IEEE 30 Bus System

using Load-Flow Studies
Ibrahem Totonchi, Hussain Al Akash, Abdelhadi Al Akash and Ayman Faza

Ibrahem tot@yahoo.com, h-u-s-s-a-i-n-@hotmail.com, Abdelhadi.akash@students.psut.edu.jo, a.faza@psut.edu.jo.

King Abdullah II School for Electrical Engineering
Princess Sumaya University for Technology
Amman-Jordan
Abstract- Load flow analysis is the backbone of the power
system studies and design, and through it the voltage magnitude
and phase angle at each bus and the complex power flowing in
each transmission line can be obtained. In this paper, we use the
load-flow to perform a sensitivity analysis of the IEEE 30 bus
system. We find the maximum complex power flowing in each
transmission line in case of no fault and in case of a single
transmission line fault in the steady state condition. The results of
this analysis helps identify the most critical lines in the system,
which can help better plan the capacities of such lines, and
minimize the probability of potential cascading failures.

Keywords: load flow; reliability; sensitivity anal ysis; cascading

failures

I.

INTRODUCTION

Capacity planning for power systems is very important to

ensure proper and reliable operation of the grid. Proper
planning ensures that a system is capable of generating,
transmitting and delivering electric power to everyone,
without interruption. However, it is also desirable that the
system be capable of providing those services when one or
more lines in the system have failed.
Many of the failures that randomly occur in a transmission
line can have a catastrophic effect. A failure of one line forces
the flow of power to be rerouted through the other lines in the
system, potentially causing some of them to overload, in order
to compensate for the loss of the initial line. The overloads
that occur in the other transmission lines cause them to be
disconnected from the system by the action of the protective
devices. This in turn can cause similar overloads and
disconnections in other lines in the system in a cascading
fashion, eventually leading to a system blackout.
In this paper, we present a sensitivity analysis of the IEEE
30 bus system, which aims to reduce the probability of a
cascading effect in the system. In order to do that, we perform
a load flow analysis on the initial fault free system, and
additionally perform a similar analysis when at least one
transmission line has failed, enumerating all the possible
cases. The goal of this study is to find the worst case flow
scenario; that is, the maximum flow in the system's remaining
transmission lines, for each transmission line failure, and look
for potential cascading failures in the system. The overarching
objective of this work is to develop ideas and methodologies

to improve the reliability of the IEEE30 bus system, and

further generalize it to any other power system, using
methodologies such as capacity planning, the use flow control
devices such as FACTS devices, and the use of distributed
generation (DG) methods, including renewable energy
methods such as solar and wind to gradually convert the
power system from a radially connected network to a meshed
network with generation occurring at both sides of the system.
Some of the suggestions that we will present at the end of
this paper will include raising the capacities of some of the
transmission lines in the system. Raising the capacity of all the
transmissions lines in the system may not be very efficient or
may be a bit hard to accomplish, but we could raise the
capacity of some critical transmission lines to minimize the
occurrence of cascading failure. The main contribution in this
paper is to determine the most critical transmission lines in
the IEEE 30 bus system, whose failure can have catastrophic
effect on the system. We further provide suggestions on how to
improve the operation ofthe grid by providing suggestions on
improving the operation of such lines.
Those critical
transmission lines will be revealed after studying the results
obtained from the load flow analysis.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
provides a literature review of the studies performed on the
IEEE30 bus system, in addition to other relevant studies.
Section III presents the IEEE 30 bus system in more details.
Section IV introduces the load flow analysis and the initial
results obtained in a fault free system. Section V presents the
sensitivity analysis performed and shows the results, and also
presents a few examples of cascading failures that can occur in
the system. Section VI concludes the paper and provides a
vision of the expected future work in this project.
II.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Many studies has been conducted on the IEEE 30 bus

system tackling various subjects. In this section we present a
number of such studies that are relevant to this work. The
authors of [2] present a basic load flow analysis, which aims
to find the converged bus voltages using both the Gauss-Siedel
and Newton-Raphson methods and compare the two numerical
methods in terms of complexity and convergence rate among

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2013 3rd International Conference on Electric Power and Energy Conversion Systems, Yildiz Teclmical University, Istanbul, Turkey, October 2-4,2013

others. In another study [3], the Total Transfer Capability

(TTC) and Available Transfer Capability (ATC) have been
studied [3] which give a general feeling of the amount of
complex power generated into the system. According to the
authors, with the recent trend towards deregulating power
systems around the world, transfer capability computation
emerges as the key issue to a smoothly running power market
with multiple transactions. A key concept in the restructuring
of the electric power industry is the ability to accurately and
rapidly quantify the capabilities of the transmission system.
Total Transfer Capability (TTC) is defmed as the amount of
electric power that can be transferred over the interconnected
transmission network in a reliable manner while meeting all of
a specific set of defmed pre- and post-contingency system
conditions. Available Transfer Capability (ATC) is a measure
of the transfer capability remaining in the physical
transmission network for further commercial activity over and
above already committed uses. In [3], MATLAB software is
used to determine the TTC of power transfers between
different control areas in deregulated power systems without
violating system constraints such as thermal, voltage, and
stability constraints. The main aim of the paper is to calculate
total transfer capability and capacity benefit margin of IEEE
3D-bus Reliability Test System (RTS) for calculation of ATe.
In another project [4], the authors study the performance of
indirectly controlled STATCOM; a Flexible AC Transmission
System (FACTS) device primarily used for reactive power
compensation and improvement of voltage profile in the
system, is used with IEEE 3D-bus system. In this article a
Cascade Multilevel Inverter (CMU) based on the indirectly
controlled STATCOM has been placed in IEEE30-bus system
for its performance evaluation in regulating the voltages of
different buses. Other studies such as [5] tackled the voltage

collapse prediction problem for interconnected power systems

which is a steady state analysis applied to study the voltage
collapse problems. In this paper, a modal analysis method is
used to investigate the stability of the power system. Q-V
curves are used to confirm the obtained results and to predict
the stability margin or distance to voltage collapse based on
reactive power load demand. The analysis in this paper is
performed for three well-known systems; the Western System
Coordinating Council (WSCC) 3-Machines, 9-Bus system, the
IEEE14 Bus system, and the IEEE30-bus system.
Our work is different from these studies in that it focuses on
understanding the effect of a single transmission line failure
on the overall operation of the system. We study the
sensitivity of the system to the occurrence of a single line
fault, and provide a capacity planning method for such a
scenario. In addition, we explore the notion of a cascading
failure in the IEEE 30 bus system, in preparation of a further
investigation into methods to mitigate such failures and reduce
the probability of their occurrence.
III.

LOAD FLOW AND THE IEEE 30 BUS SYSTEM

The IEEE 30 bus system consists of 30 buses, 41

transmission lines and a number of transformers and
synchronous condensers. It represents a portion of the
American electrical power system in the Midwest region.
Figure 1 below depicts the system. The bus generation and
loads data were obtained from [6].
For the analysis of this paper, we performed load flow for
the IEEE30 bus system using the Gauss-Seidel method. The
load flow was performed for the initial case where all
transmission lines are functioning in the system. Additionally,
we run load flow after removing one transmission line at a
time for the total of 41 transmission lines, and we documented

Figure 1 - The IEEE 30 Bus System

2013 3rd International Conference on Electric Power and Energy Conversion Systems, Yildiz Teclmical University, Istanbul, Turkey, October 2-4,2013

the results. The main purpose of this study was to determine

the worst case flow values in each transmission line in the
system, when one line fails; that is a sensitivity analysis of the
IEEE30 bus system to a failure in a single transmission line. In
addition, if we know the line capacities in the IEEE30 bus
system, we can simulate the effect of cascading failures, by
taking out the lines that overload when a single line failure
occurs, and repeating the process. To run the simulations, we
used a MATLAB based load flow simulator, and we simulated
a total of 41 failure cases, in addition to the case were all lines
are working. In the following section, we present the results of
the load flow analysis and further discuss their implications.
IV.

LOAD FLOW ANALYSIS RESULTS

1) The Load Flow Problem [IJ

The load flow problem or the power flow problem is the
computation of voltage magnitude and phase angle at each bus
in a power system under balanced three-phase steady state
conditions.
As a byproduct of this calculation, real and reactive power
flows in equipment such as transmission lines and
transformers, as well as equipment losses, can be computed.
The starting point for a power-flow problem is a single line
diagram of the power system, from which the input data for
computer solutions can be obtained. Input data consist of bus
voltage, real and reactive power generated, and real and
reactive power demand at each bus, in addition to the
transmission line parameters.
As shown in Figure 2, for any bus i the following eight
variables are associated with each bus;

: The voltage at bus i

8i The phase angle at bus i,
g : The generated real power
gi : The generated reactive power
d : The real power demand
Qd : The reactive power demand
:

From these parameters, the scheduled real and reactive powers

are calculated as follows:

sch g - d (1)
Q,ch Qg - Qd (2)
=

Pisch

Pid

Qiisch

Oid
-t-

Figure 2

Vi L0
A Snapshot of Bus i and its Parameters.

2) Constructing the Admittance Matrix(the Y-bus Matrix)

The second important step in performing the load flow is to
construct the Y-bus matrix. The Y-bus matrix is an
N X N matrix, where N is the total number of buses, and it
can generally be constructed by inspection, by systematically
evaluating its parameters based on the transmission line data
given in the problem. In general, and entry in the matrix at
row i and column j;

/ is

equal to the negative sum of the

parallel admittances connected between buses i and j. The

diagonal elements;

i is the sum of the admittances connected

to bus i, regardless of which bus the other side of the

admittance is connected to . With that in mind, finding all the
elements in the Y-bus matrix becomes straightforward.
After constructing the v-bus matrix, and using the Gauss
Seidel method, the voltage at each bus can be found by
iteratively solving the following equations:
For a load bus, the kth iteration of the voltage at bus i can be
found as follows:

V(k) = [ V*(k-I)

SCh- jQ\ch
Y
l
..

It

(3)

For a generator bus, we first need to get an estimate of

to be used in place of

Qsch .

Q(k) = {V*Ck-l) [-l V(k)

_

1m

111

11=1

Depending on the type of bus; slack, generator, or load

bus, the known variables and the unknown could be anything
among the voltage magnitude, the voltage angle, and the real
power generated, and the reactive power generated.

We use the following

equation:

. Y

111

n=1

V(k-I)]}
1

(4)

Then the voltage at bus I can be found by using a modified

version of equation (3) as follows:

V(k) = [ V*(k-IQ) Ck) ( VCk)

1

_
..

(5)

Y"

Plsch- J
I

n=1

"N Y
. m
n=z+1
.

VCk-l) Jl
n

2013 3rd International Conference on Electric Power and Energy Conversion Systems, Yildiz Teclmical University, Istanbul, Turkey, October 2-4,2013

3.Results o{The Load Flow Analysis, for a normally

running system with no failures.
Running the load flow simulation for the normal fault free
IEEE 30 bus system resulted in the following bus voltage
results as shown in Table 1. Simulation was performed using
Matlab and the results were confirmed using the Power World
Simulator (PWS). The simulation parameters were set such
that the error tolerance in the voltage was set to 0.01 per unit.
Table 1 - Load Flow Results for the Fault-Free IEEE118 Bus
System
Bus
Bus
Voltage
Voltage
2
1
1.06LO
1.04L-5Z
1.03L-7.4

3
5
7
9
11

1.02L-9T

1.0 1L- 1 3X

1.02L- 1 0X

LOlL- 1 2.6

1.04L- 1 3.So

1.01L- 1 1.3

10

1.03L-15.4

1.0SL- 1 3X

12

1.04L- 1 4.T

13

1.07L- 1 4.T

14

1.02L- 15.6

15

1.02L- 15.T

16

1.03L- 15.3
1.01L- 16.3

17

1.02L- 15S

18

19

LOlL-16.4

20

21
23
25
27

1.02L- 15X

1.02L- 15X

1.0 1 L-16

24

1.00L- 16Z

1.00L- 15.So

26

O.9SL- 16Z

1.00L-15.3

28

1.02L- 1 1.4

30

O.97L- 17S

O.9SL- 16S

29

1.0 1L- 16Z

22

The system needed 123 iterations to converge. Note that all

the above values are in per unit with 1OOMV A base complex
power.
V.

SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS AND THE CASCADING FAILURE

EXAMPLES

1)

The Sensitivity Analysis

The main purpose of the sensitivity analysis in this paper, is

to determine the worst case scenario that could occur due to
the failure of one transmission line. To do that, we obtain the
maximum complex power going through each transmission
lines in the case of no faults and in case of a one transmission
line fault. This is performed for all 41 transmission lines.
The complex power between bus i and bus j can be found as
follows:
Slj

Where,

= VJ,; (6)

is the currents carried by the transmission line connecting bus

i and bus j.
Given the previous analysis, we removed one line from the
system at a time, and found the amount of power flow in each
transmission line. Then we took the maximum power flow in
each line that could occur due to the failure of one
transmission line. The results of this simulation are
documented in Table 2 below.
Table 2 - Maximum Power Flow in Each Transmission Line,
Due to a Single Transmission Line Failure
TL
TL
TL
TL
Max
Max
number
number
Flow
Flow
(from
(from
bus to
bus to
bus)
bus)
22
2.6428
1
1-2
15-18
0.1582
2
18-19
1-3
23
0.1221
2.9309
24
2-4
19-20
3
0.8224
0.1726
4
3-4
2.7255
25
10-20
0.1986
10-17
26
2-5
1.2383
5
0.2585
10-21
27
2-6
0.9997
0.2653
6
10-22
28
0.2412
7
4-6
1.7064
21-22
29
5-7
0.2034
1.0603
8
0.1215
9
6-7
1.2994
15-23
30
22-24
10
31
0.2099
6-8
0.3160
23-24
32
0.1103
11
6-9
0.5078
12
24-25
33
6-10
0.1940
0.2810
34
13
9-11
0.0428
0.1771
25-26
14
9-10
35
25-27
0.1415
0.4983
4-12
0.2480
15
27-28
0.6202
36
12-13
37
27-29
0.1443
16
0.3310
12-14
0.1424
17
0.1714
27-30
38
12-15
0.1122
39
29-30
18
0.2579
40
19
12-16
0.1584
8-28
0.3083
41
0.4734
20
14-15
0.1029
6-28
21
16-17
0.1779
Note that the above values are in per unit with 1OOMV A base
complex power.
For the sensitivity analysis the resultant maximum
complex power flowing in each transmission line was caused
by removing or a failure in a specific transmission line. For
example, the maximum power flowing in transmission lines
number 2, 4, 7 and 10 is caused by failure in transmission line
number 1, and the maximum power flowing in transmission
lines number 11, 12, 14, 16, 21, 24, 25, 26, 32 and 36 is
caused by the failure in transmission line number 15. In
addition, the maximum power flowing in transmission lines
number 27, 30, 31, 33, 34 and 35 is caused by the failure in
transmission line number 36.
It is obvious from this analysis that transmission line 1, 15
and 36 are the most critical lines in the grid; therefore, raising
the capacity of those three lines only we can help reduce or the
number of cascading failures (to be explained in the following
section) that can occur in the system.

2013 3rd International Conference on Electric Power and Energy Conversion Systems, Yildiz Teclmical University, Istanbul, Turkey, October 2-4,2013

2) Cascading Failure Examples

In addition to the sensitivity analysis presented above, it is of
great value to try and discover potential cascading failures in
the system. A cascading failure occurs when the failure of one
transmission line causes the other lines to overload, which in
turn causes these overloaded lines to be disconnected from the
system using protective devices, which then causes further
overloads and failures leading eventually to a complete system
blackout.
To simulate cascading failures, we set the capacity of each
transmission line to 120% of the rated complex power value
flowing in the line, which was obtained from the initial case of
no transmission line failures presented in Section IV above.
We analyzed three interesting cascading failure cases in
this system.
In the first case, we remove transmission line number 1
which connects bus I and bus 2. This will cause an overload at
transmission lines 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30
and 32. The failure of these transmission lines causes an
overload at lines 5, 6, 13, 14, 26, 27, 29, 31, 33 and 35, and
after that all of these failures cause an over load at
transmission lines 26, 25, 15, 14, 13 and 12, eventually
leading to a total blackout.
In the second case, we remove transmission line number 8.
This will cause a failure in transmission line number 5 and
those two failures will then isolate bus number 5 with bus
voltage magnitude and angle of O .
I n the third case, w e remove transmission line number 39,
which will cause an overload and then failure in transmission
line number 38, then that will cause an overload at
transmission lines number 40, 35, 33, and 29. In this case bus
number 30 will be isolated (islanding) with no power flowing
towards it.
3) Further Analysis
In addition to the previous analysis, we have two buses in
the system which generate real power; that is bus number 1
and 2 with four transmission lines connecting them to the rest
of the system; transmission lines number 3, 5, 6 and 8. This
shows that these lines can be considered critical transmission
lines and raising their power capacity would help improve the
system's reliability and reduce the possibility of system
blackouts.
The rest of the transmission line failure effects can be
summarized in Table 3 below.
Table III shows the effect of a failure in each line, and
specifies which transmission line gets the maximum amount
of flow due to this failure.
The results shown in Table III above help grasp the cause
effect scenarios for transmission lien failures, which can
further help us in better planning for the line capacities in the
IEEE 30 bus system.

Table 3 - Transmission Line Failures, and Worst Case

Scenarios
TL in which Initial failure
TL at which maximum power
flows due to this failure
occurs
2
1
4
3
9
5
6, 8, 9
5
13
11
17, 20
18
7
15, 18, 19
22, 23
25
27
28, 29
37, 39
38
37
38
10
40, 41
VI.

COCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

Power flow or load-flow studies are important for planning

future expansion of power systems as well as in determining
the best operation of existing systems. The principal
information obtained from the power flow study is the
magnitude and phase angle of the voltage at each bus, and the
real and reactive power flowing in each line. We performed a
sensitivity analysis which aims to have a general feeling of the
system by finding the maximum complex power flowing in
each transmission line in the case of no faults and in the case
of one transmission line fault in the steady state condition.
Results show that a few of the lines are significantly more
critical than the others when it comes to their failure. Our
study helped us identify the lines that are most critical to the
operation of the system, which can help better plan for their
capacities to reduce the effects of failures in the system, and
decrease the probability of occurrence of a cascading failure.
Future work in this project will include implementing
methods to improve the reliability of the system by using
intelligent devices such as FACTS devices, in addition to
implementing distributed generation and renewable energy
sources into the grid. Our objective is to make the grid more
intelligent, and convert the traditional IEEE 30 bus system
from the conventional radial scheme to a more intelligent
meshed network as we gradually move the existing power
systems from the conventional power grid to the more
advanced Smart Grid.
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