Quantum contingency analysis for power system steady-state security identification

Unprecedented extreme climate events cause devastating infrastructure outages within power systems. Comprehensive outage identification is essential for the identification of critical components to ensure the uninterrupted power supply in a secure manner to withstand extreme weather events. Accurate outage identification, however, requires simulations of a large number of outage scenarios necessitating highly scalable computations thus challenging classical computing paradigms. Quantum computing provides a promising resolution by exploiting exponential scalability achieved through superposition and entanglement of voltage states. This paper devises a quantum contingency analysis (QCA) method to identify outage scenarios on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Advanced quantum circuits incorporating Pauli-twirling, dynamic decoupling, and matrix-free measurement are designed to mitigate hardware-induced errors. A preconditioned hybrid method is devised to alleviate the computation burden of parameter optimization of quantum gates. Case studies identify line and generation outages via QCA in typical power systems. Our research underscores that quantum computing exhibits exponential scalability in identifying power grid outages and critical components.