Quantifying and Improving Resilience in Power Distribution Systems

Shiva Poudel

Extreme weather events have a significant impact on the aging and outdated power distribution infrastructures resulting in extended outages and loss of critical services. This calls for the need to ensure resilience in distribution networks by quickly restoring the critical services during a disaster. Unfortunately, the power distribution systems are traditionally designed and operated for known and credible threats and, therefore, are not resilient to extreme events. Fortunately, the aggressive deployment of smart grid technologies provides a source for improving efficiency, reliability, and resilience. The focus of this dissertation is to develop enablers for leveraging the smart grid technologies to enhance the resilience of the distribution networks. Towards this goal, we make the following three major contributions in this dissertation. First, we develop a probabilistic metric to quantify the operational resilience of the distribution grid. The metric is based on Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) measure, where resilience is defined as the conditional expectation of the loss of energy in MWh for events beyond a pre-specified risk threshold. A simulation-based framework to evaluate the proposed metric including the impacts of smart actions, specifically improved restoration and infrastructure hardening on the resilience metric is presented Second, we investigate the approaches for resilient restoration of power distribution networks using distributed energy resources (DERs). The proposed framework restores critical loads in the feeder while maximizing the post-restoration reliability of restored loads, including tie switches and open-loop distribution system configurations into the optimization formulation, and optimally allocating DERs for an equitable restoration of the critical loads. Further, we also present a new unified decision-making framework that can assist in recovery from both minor and major disruptions in a computationally tractable manner while efficiently utilizing DERs. The proposed formulation is a unified framework to support both the traditional restoration using feeder reconfiguration and the grid-forming DER-assisted intentional islanding methods. Third, we integrate a fault location, isolation, and service restoration (FLISR) application on an ADMS environment using the GridAPPS-D platform. The successful deployment of the FLISR application on the GridAPPS-D platform provides a proof-of-concept for the adoption of advanced applications to support future distribution systems.

Quantifying and Improving Resilience in Power Distribution Systems

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