Day-ahead preventive scheduling of power systems during natuaral hazards via stochastic optimization

Predictable weather-related natural hazards are tied to a significant portion of the blackouts in the United States. Since conventional reliability standards are not designed for such conditions, they fail to guarantee reliable delivery of power during such extreme events. This paper proposes a two-stage model for preventive operation of power systems during a natural hazard. At the first stage, failure probability of transmission towers is calculated based on fragility analysis of the structure. The failure scenarios and their probabilities are, then, generated through the analysis conducted in the first stage. At the second stage, the failure scenarios and their probabilities are used in stochastic optimization framework to explicitly model the likely failure of transmission elements. Simulation studies, carried out on IEEE 118-bus system, show that the proposed method can effectively eliminate network violations through preventive adjustment of generation dispatch. The results also show that the redispatch cost is not significant, compared to the potential consequences of shedding load.