Power System Resilience to Environmental Stressors: Hazard Characterization, Modeling, Assessment, and Mitigation
Open AccessIn the recent years, more frequent realization of high-impact low-probability (HILP) natural disasters such as hurricanes, windstorms, earthquakes, and wildfires have resulted in prolonged electricity outages, excessive equipment damages, and even more severe economic loss and disruptions in our modern society. Earthquakes and wildfires are the most destructive and frequent hazards which can cause striking damages in power systems. This calls for developing effective mechanisms that ensure a continuous and resilient supply of electricity to the end customers when dealing with the aftermath of such catastrophic incidents. This dissertation focuses on three stages of resilience against natural extremes—hazard characterization, vulnerability assessment of power networks, and effective mitigation strategies. Power system resilience specifically to earthquake and wildfire incidents is enhanced in this dissertation through holistic planning, operation, and control of microgrids in which criticalloads can be supplied during emergencies. This dissertation firstly provides a comprehensive seismic hazard modeling and impact characterization on power systems facilities and infrastructure. A novel methodology is developed that systematically captures the effects of earthquakes on power generation systems by considering realistically-large sets of scenarios generated via Monte-Carlo simulation to capture the stochastic nature of ground motions. It will be illustrated how the seismic forces can be quantified using an analytical attenuation relationship. Numerical models centered on the concept of fragility curves are developed to assess different damage states probabilities following a HILP earthquake incident. Consequently, this dissertation offers an extensive wildfire modeling approach in which the spatio-temporal wildfire behavior is characterized and the effects of wildfires on overhead power line conductors are captured. In order to evaluate the vulnerability of power distribution systems (PDSs) in the face of progressive wildfires, a novel parameterized fragility model is provided to develop a multi-dimensional wildfire fragility function for overhead power line conductors. The suggested parameterized fragility function is determined by a number of quantitative measures taking into account major sources of uncertainty during wildfire incidents. The proposed fragility function can help the electric utilities assess whether overhead power line conductors can withstand the induced increase in temperature caused by a progressive wildfire without compromising their mechanical properties. An optimization formulation is eventually adopted to enhance the operational resilience of PDSs equipped with renewable energy resources (RESs), e.g., wind and solar resources, micro turbines (MTs) as well as energy storage systems (ESSs) when exposed to progressive wildfires. In mitigation of HILP events in general and earthquakes as well as wildfires in particular, this dissertation offers to harness the potential in mobile energy storage systems (MESSs) as promising opportunities to elevate PDSs resilience. Despite the remarkable growth in integration of RESs in PDSs, most recovery and restoration strategies do not unlock the full potential in such resources as effective services for resilience delivery due to their inherent uncertainty. This dissertation aims to develop a stochastic service restoration framework in PDSs for emergency response through routing and scheduling of MESSs jointly managed with dynamic network reconfiguration in the presence of stochastic RESs to achieve agile system response and recovery when facing the aftermath of HILP incidents.
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