Geo-Spatial Modeling for High Voltage Underground Cables to Improve Resilience

Underground cables are a distributed asset in the network which is hard to monitor and perform maintenance. The fault detection and asset management routine practiced by the power system industry are reliability-based but with an increase of extreme natural events, the industry needs to strengthen its assets to minimize unplanned and long term outages. The effect of earthquakes on the underground cable needs to be studied which requires digitization of the underground cable network on a geospatial map and to create a database of cables, and joints attribute to develop fragility function showing the vulnerability of the cable to ground-shaking event. The developed fragility functions can be used to determine the precise health of underground cables and the effect of such events on the life-line of underground cables. The results from this study will form resilience indices for underground cables. Hence, improving the resilience and reliability of underground cables to withstand future events.