Electrical resilience assessment of a building operating at low voltage

Abstract

Resilience is becoming increasingly important in power systems, microgrids (MG) and buildings. It evaluates their performance against disruptive events. The approaches mainly correspond to high-impact, low-probability events such as natural disasters and intentional attacks affecting the electrical systems infrastructure. However, resilience can encompass medium and low-impact events such as minor civil structural accidents, light faults and supply disturbances. Some resilience assessment advances are in buildings at the low-voltage (LV) level. They include vulnerability to natural disasters, reliability of supply, and service quality. These works usually use approaches independent of each other, leaving a gap between their relationship and interpretation. Therefore, there is a need to consolidate a resilience assessment strategy to guide the analysis of vulnerabilities and strengths in the same direction. This paper proposes a comprehensive approach to evaluate electrical resilience for buildings. It compiles quantitative strategies for studying electrical resilience, focusing on LV systems. It proposes a methodology for integrating the electrical system infrastructure's vulnerability, the supply's continuity and the voltage service's quality. Implementing this approach in a university building equipped with smart metering demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology for assessing electrical resilience. The results show a comprehensive resilience analysis and the possibility of extending the methodology to MG and LV distribution networks.