Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Electrical Engineering Department

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

Natural disasters, such as floods, may damage power system assets and lead to widespread and long outages. The impact of flood can be alleviated by preventive actions such as installing tiger dams around power substations before the flood. In this regard, it is imperative that critical substations are identified in terms of the connected load and imposed costs to the system. This study presents a resource allocation approach for protecting power substations against flood events a day ahead of the event. First, the required information for the model is extracted. Flood probability distribution functions are used to generate several flood scenarios at each substation. Using flood scenarios and substations’ fragility, damage, and repair time curves obtained from historical data, the failure probability, damage percentage, damage cost, and repair time of substations are estimated. This information is input to a stochastic protective scheduling model to minimize the damage costs to the system, including substations’ damage costs and the cost of unsupplied energy. To reduce the computational cost of the optimization problem, a scenario reduction method is developed to generate representative substation failure scenarios. To make the model more comprehensive, both transmission and distribution substations are taken into account. As the availability of one can impact the decisions made for the other interconnected substations, network connections and the correlation between transmission and distribution substations are incorporated into the model. The proposed model determines the best preventive action one day ahead of flood based on the available resources to maximize grid resilience. In addition to technical and economic objectives, the vulnerabilities of marginalized communities are incorporated into the proposed resource allocation model. A budgetary division strategy that integrates equity into the optimization problem while preserving a predefined budget allocation for equitable purposes is presented. The distribution of the equity budget among zones is determined by a vulnerability index, which is defined using criteria such as the condition of power system equipment, the percentage of disadvantaged communities, and the economic status of each zone. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Date

1-24-2024

Committee Chair

Kargarian, Amin

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Available for download on Saturday, January 11, 2025

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