This paper investigates the strategic placement of inverter-based generators (IBGs) in power electronics penetrated (PE-penetrated) power systems, aiming to mitigate power blackout risk. Two metrics, namely distance of load to IBGs (DL2IBG) and Gini coefficient (GI), are employed to guide this placement strategy. DL2IBG assesses how concentrated the distribution of IBGs is in the network, while GI evaluates the uniformity of power generation among different IBGs. By setting the network configuration based on these metrics, the relationship between the metrics and the blackout risk evaluated through cascading failure simulation is examined. The simulation results on the IEEE 118-bus system emphasize the crucial role of determining GI across various DL2IBG in mitigating blackout risks, particularly as the penetration levels of IBGs vary. This research offers valuable and practical insights into optimizing the placement of IBGs to enhance the resilience of PE-penetrated power systems.

Strengthening critical components is considered one of the most essential means to enhance the robustness of power networks against cascading failure. This paper proposes an iterative method to strengthen the critical power network branches identified from a tailor-made failure propagation graph. To construct the failure propagation graph, we generate numerous cascading failure trees, capturing both temporal and spatial features of failure propagation processes from cascading failure simulations. The constructed graph is a weighted and directed graph that is able to characterize failure propagation patterns in a power network. By employing weighted eigenvector centrality to assess node criticality, we iterate through the graph to identify the most significant nodes and subsequently determine the critical power network branches to be strengthened. Simulation results in the IEEE 118 bus system demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our strategy in mitigating cascading failure compared to existing methods.