An Evaluative Framework for Regional Vulnerability and Power System Resilience Against Flooding: A Case Study of Charleston County, South Carolina

In light of increasing flood risks and the substantial financial impact of grid disruptions, this paper proposes a framework aimed at identifying and protecting electric substations prone to flooding. By harnessing diverse data sets, including flood indices, historical water levels, and proximity to rivers, this methodology pinpoints areas with heightened vulnerability to flooding. The framework integrates past data on substation fragility, damage, and repair times with flood depth scenarios and probabilities to estimate potential failure and damage costs. Significantly, it incorporates not only financial ramifications, but also human impacts, such as the proximity of critical centers, population density, and community priorities. This novel approach enables a more holistic strategy for enhancing grid resilience in severe flood scenarios. The cornerstone of this work is a stochastic risk-based decision-making model designed to establish an optimal action plan for substation protection. It processes inputs like flood-related failure probabilities, locations of critical centers, substation costs, and census data to generate a priority list for preventive measures against flood vulnerability. This approach sets the stage for timely and effective responses to safeguard critical power infrastructure. This method is applied on Charleston County, South Carolina, as a case study. This study determines the areas which are more susceptible in terms of financial losses and human impacts. Furthermore, using the introduced flooding resilience metric, the most vulnerable regions against flooding are determined so that the priorities for increasing the resilience of the power system in this metropolitan be recognized.