Power Distribution System Planning for Mitigating Overheating Risk Inequity

Extreme heat events are increasingly impacting the operation of power distribution systems, causing overloads due to excessive use of air conditioning systems, forcing power utilities to take measures to avoid large-scale blackouts in a bulk transmission system, including rotating outages. However, these power outages expose communities to overheating risk as air conditioning ceases operation, which is inequitably distributed and affects vulnerable communities mainly. This paper proposes a framework to quantify and mitigate the outage-induced overheating risk during a heat wave, which corresponds to the overheating that can be avoided by utility action. The framework features a metric that captures the impact of power outages during heat waves on individual buildings, which is aggregated to derive system-level metrics to assess the resilience of a distribution grid. This metric is integrated into a distribution planning model to drive decisions on distribution grid investments in an equity-informed manner. The framework is evaluated in modified IEEE 33-node and 123-node test systems, where the ability of the framework to capture and equitably allocate distributed resources is validated, paving the way for regulatory frameworks that account for social equity impact in the power sector.