Creating, Validating, and Using Synthetic Power Flow Cases: A Statistical Approach to Power System Analysis

Synthetic power system test cases offer a wealth of new data for research and development purposes, as well as an avenue through which new kinds of analyses and questions can be examined. This work provides both a methodology for creating and validating synthetic test cases, as well as a few use-cases for how access to synthetic data enables otherwise impossible analysis.

First, the question of how synthetic cases may be generated in an automatic manner, and how synthetic samples should be validated to assess whether they are sufficiently ``real'' is considered. Transmission and distribution levels are treated separately, due to the different nature of the two systems. Distribution systems are constructed by sampling distributions observed in a dataset from the Netherlands. For transmission systems, only first-order statistics, such as generator limits or line ratings are sampled statistically. The task of constructing an optimal power flow case from the sample sets is left to an optimization problem built on top of the optimal power flow formulation.

Secondly, attention is turned to some examples where synthetic models are used to inform analysis and modeling tasks. Co-simulation of transmission and multiple distribution systems is considered, where distribution feeders are allowed to couple transmission substations. Next, a distribution power flow method is parametrized to better account for losses. Numerical values for the parametrization can be statistically supported thanks to the ability to generate thousands of feeders on command.