ParaEMT: An Open Source, Parallelizable, and HPC-Compatible EMT Simulator for Large-Scale IBR-Rich Power Grids

Abstract

The electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation is an essential tool for studying power grids dominated by inverter-based resources (IBRs). However, due to small simulation time steps and increasing problem sizes, performing EMT simulations for large-scale power grids becomes computational-intensive, and often impractical. To address this challenge, we developed ParaEMT, an open-source Python-based EMT simulator that is parallelizable and compatible with high-performance computing (HPC) systems for simulating large-scale power grids with a significant presence of IBRs. Its key features include: 1) utilizing parallel computation for network solution by decomposing the network conductance matrix into the bordered block diagonal form; 2) enabling parallel updates of device states and network historical currents; 3) leveraging HPC to further accelerate simulation through a developed generic interface. The accuracy of ParaEMT has been validated on the reduced 240-bus (720-node) Western Electricity Coordinating Council system by benchmarking the EMT dynamics against PSCAD. Furthermore, ParaEMT achieves a notable speedup of approximately 25 to 36 times on a synthetic 10,080-bus (30240-node) system by leveraging the HPC resource named Eagle at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. A regional 100% renewable case of the reduced 240-bus system has been developed for simulating system-wide IBRs’ interactions in large-scale power grids using ParaEMT.