Resilience-Oriented DG Siting and Sizing Considering Energy Equity Constraint

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new DG siting and sizing method that incorporates an energy equity constraint to improve resilience for low-income customers during extreme weather events.

Contribution

It introduces an energy equity constraint into the DG planning model, addressing energy inequities in resilience planning for the first time.

Findings

The model effectively improves energy equity in simulated systems.

Incorporating EEC reduces load shedding disparities.

Numerical studies validate the approach's effectiveness.

Abstract

Extreme weather events can cause widespread power outages and huge economic losses. Low-income customers are more vulnerable to power outages because they live in areas with poorly equipped distribution systems. However, existing approaches to improve grid resilience focus on the overall condition of the system and ignore the outage experiences of low-income customers, which leads to significant energy inequities in resilience. Therefore, this paper explores a new resilience-oriented planning method for distributed generator (DG) siting and sizing, by embedding an additional energy equity constraint (EEC). First, the expected load shedding index (ELSI) is defined as the ratio of the load shedding to the original load, which quantifies the resilience-oriented energy equity. Then, the DG siting and sizing problem is formulated as a two-stage stochastic programming with the EEC. The first stage determines the optimal sites and sizes of DG units under investment constraints and EECs, while the second stage optimizes expected costs of unserved load. A subsidiary variable is introduced to ensure the model's solvability. Finally, numerical studies are performed on the IEEE 33-bus and 123-bus systems to verify the effectiveness of the proposed DG planning model in achieving energy equity. Three observations are presented as future guidelines for resilience-oriented DG planning.