Targeted Hardening of Electric Distribution System for Enhanced Resilience against Earthquakes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hardware hardening framework to enhance the resilience of electric distribution systems against earthquakes, utilizing fragility curves, Monte Carlo simulations, and economic analysis to identify optimal strategies.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework combining fragility analysis, simulation, and optimization for earthquake hardening of power distribution networks.

Findings

Optimal hardening strategies improve resilience during earthquakes.

The framework effectively identifies cost-efficient hardening measures.

Simulations demonstrate increased supply reliability post-earthquake.

Abstract

Securing the power system from catastrophic natural disasters is a rising problem in power system operation and planning. This paper particularly considers earthquake and aims to evaluate and improve the resilience of power distribution networks by developing a novel hardware hardening framework. In the proposed framework, fragility curves of the network equipment are used to represent equipment failure probabilities when facing an earthquake, and failure scenarios of the distribution network are obtained via the Monte Carlo method. Based on the distribution network topology and the locations of essential loads, various hardware hardening strategies are determined within the proposed framework. Through a series of resilience and economic analyses, the optimal hardening strategy is determined to improve the resilience and supply the essential loads during and after the earthquake. The efficacy of the proposed approach is examined through simulations on an IEEE 33-bus test feeder.