Resilience of Power Systems to Ice Storms: Analysis and Quantification

Major damage to power system components and prolonged power outages caused by severe ice storms call for developing approaches that assess the resilience of power systems against these storms. However, the diverse spatiotemporal characteristics of ice storms introduce high uncertainties related to system component failures, performance, and resilience level. This paper proposes a resilience assessment approach to evaluate the resilience of power systems under diverse ice storm characteristics. Spatiotemporal models are used in this paper to emulate the behavior of ice storms as they move across the system. Extensive statistical analyses are carried out to derive probability distribution functions for the parameters governing the behavior of ice storms in a given geographical region. A fragility model is used to determine the likelihood of a system component to fail as an ice storm moves across the system. Finally, a combinatorial enumeration-based approach is applied to quantity the resilience of power systems against ice storms. The proposed approach is tested by simulating ice storms in the 25000-bus synthetic power grid representing the Northeastern and Mideast regions of the United States. The results show that the proposed method is effective in assessing the resilience of power grids under diverse ice storm characteristics.