Maintaining Electric System Safety Through An Enhanced Network Resilience

Abstract

Global environmental variations in the past two decades have contributed to a significant deviation of classic ecological patterns, leading to severe electricity outages triggered by extreme weather-driven phenomena. This has highlighted an urgent need for enhancing the resilience and robustness of the interconnected electricity grid against such high impact low probability (HILP) incidents. From the electrical safety point of view, it is essential to increase the operators’ awareness on a better understanding of such hazards and grid vulnerabilities, and enhance their preparedness on how to respond or mitigate the probable outages. This paper proposes a temporary, yet agile, restoration strategy in response to the forecasted HILP events, founded based on efficient utilization of the grid existing infrastructure, and aimed at improving its resilience against such extreme emergencies. The applied concept of reconfiguration is proactively planned to recover the electricity outages in a timely manner. In the meantime, two sets of metrics are proposed to quantify both the grid operational and infrastructure resilience. The presented framework aids the system operator to evaluate the outage recovery plans considering their impacts on system resilience and decide on the final implementation. The proposed approach is applied to the IEEE 118-bus test system facing an HILP event, where results reveal its applicability and efficiency.