Adaptive Capacity Determination for Critical Load in Power Systems

Resilience metrics are the cornerstone of implementing resilience-based improvements to the electric utility sector. There is a recognized need in power systems for increased resilience and there are numerous power system devices and methods that aim to improve resilience. These methods and devices need to be evaluated for their actual resilience value for each system they aim to improve to determine their worth for each system. This work presents the resilience metric called adaptive capacity calculated using the available transfer capability (ATC) method. Adaptive capacity determines the maximum incremental amount of power that can be transferred to critical loads in the aftermath of an event. The use of this metric is demonstrated by comparing the adaptive capacity of eight seasonal scenarios of the 2000-bus synthetic transmission network on the footprint of Texas with and without the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs). This work highlights how adaptive capacity can help determine where the integration of DERs in the system will and will not provide a resilience benefit.