Resilience assessment of active distribution networks

Abstract

Power system resilience focuses on a system's ability to prepare for and recover from events which would severely degrade its performance. With severe weather events and regional disasters such as hurricanes, polar vortex cold, and wildfires increasing in frequency and intensity in recent years, work toward simulation and quantification techniques of power system resilience is more necessary than ever. To generate a realistic model, this work produces a geographic topography to geographically lay out and test power system. Furthermore, different extreme events such as flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes are modeled, and the proposed technique evaluates their impacts on the power system degradation and resilience. The availability of recovery resources and several stochastic recovery dynamics that modify the system's depth of degradation and recovery profile during repair time are studied in this work. Multiple resilience metrics are proposed to aid in analyzing the system's recovery performance. The performance of this proposed technique is then evaluated for a flood of intermediate intensity which causes component failures and system outages within the grid. System recovery resources are varied by adjusting the number of crews who can simultaneously repair the system. Resilience indices are evaluated, and it is shown that with increasing availability of repair crews and recovery resources, the system resilience improves. The proposed strategy can be applied to an arbitrary test system with ease. Different strategies such as energy storage management and repair prioritization can be modified in future works to test potential improvements or optimizations for a given test system under the occurrence of a specific extreme event.