  While power systems are reliable infrastructures, their complex
interconnectivities allow for propagation of disturbances through cascading
failures which causes blackouts. Meanwhile the ever increasing penetration
level of renewable generation into power grids introduces a massive amount of
uncertainty to the grid that might have a severe impact on grid vulnerability
to overload cascading failures. There are numerous studies in the literature
that focus on modeling cascading failures with different approaches. However,
there is a need for studies that simulate cascading failure considering the
uncertainty coming from high penetration of renewable generation. In this
study, the impacts of wind generation in terms of its penetration and
uncertainty levels on grid vulnerability to cascading overload failures are
studied. The simulation results on IEEE 300 bus system show that uncertainty
coming from wind energy have severe impact on grid vulnerability to cascading
overload failures. Results also suggest that higher penetration levels of wind
energy if not managed appropriately will add to this severity due to injection
of higher uncertainties into the grid.
