Resilience Assessment Approach for Transmission Systems Considering Uncertainties of Ice Storms

Ice storms have a wide range of impacts on power systems ranging from long outage times to major equipment failures. The diverse spatiotemporal characteristics of ice storms create high uncertainties in system performance and resilience level. Recent extended outages of various interdependent systems such as, power and water systems, due to ice storms have called for further investigation and resilience assessment approaches. In this paper, a planning-based resilience assessment framework is utilized to assess the resilience level of transmission systems. First, a spatiotemporal ice storm model is used to simulate various scenarios of ice storms. Then, a fragility model is implemented to evaluate the probability of failure of system components in terms of weather parameters. Finally, a quantitative resilience assessment method based on combinatorial enumeration is applied to compute a resilience index for the system. The proposed algorithm is carried out on the IEEE 30-bus system mapped on the Eastern region of the United States. Numerous ice storm scenarios are simulated based on real weather-data. The proposed algorithm is able to assess system resilience characteristics considering uncertainties of ice storms.