Power System Resiliency and Reliability Issues from Renewable Resource Droughts

This paper models the outlier but impactful extreme weather scenarios called renewable resource droughts (RRDs) including wind resource droughts (WRDs) and solar resource droughts (SRDs) based on the directly including weather measurements in the optimal power flow and study their impact on the power systems based on reliability measures such as reactive power available capacities, bus voltage and line congestions. Since the weather measurements changes the available capacities of generators, they are used to find the generation dispatch in a variety of drought scenarios and show their impact on the power grid. The criteria for drought identification is based on the generation dispatch in each weather scenario rather than just the weather data. The historical weather data is used for drought identification and extreme cases are selected for a more detailed study. The results show the impact of these events on the grid. Preventive and corrective actions are suggested to avoid operation problems in such cases.