Multi-Resource Trade-Offs in Resilience Planning Decisions for Power Distribution Systems

Extreme weather events have created a growing concern for power distribution systems, and it is challenging to justify planning budgets due to high levels of uncertainty in observing these events and their impacts on the system. This paper presents a trade-off analysis of different resilience-based active distribution system upgrade solutions, specifically to mitigate the outage risks of high-speed wind events. The resilience planning problem for unbalanced three-phase distribution systems is formulated as a two-stage risk-averse stochastic optimization model with conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) as the risk measure. The possible planning measures include installing grid-forming distributed generators (DGs) capable of islanded operation, installing remote-controlled tie-switches, and implementing line hardening solutions. Realistic wind data and fragility models are adopted to simulate high-speed wind event scenarios. The parameters used in this work for trade-off analysis are fragility models, risk preference, multiple planning resources, and planning budget allocation. The proposed approach is validated on a modified IEEE-123 bus test case. The analysis presented in this work can inform system operators about the trade-offs in optimal planning budget and resource allocation, ultimately enhancing the resilience of the distribution grid.