Optimal Energy Management of A Power Transmission Grid under A Heatwave Exposure

The recent increase in number of weather events across the globe has grabbed the attention of researchers and industry. Weather related events such as extreme temperatures, hurricanes and earthquake are responsible of the majority of power outages in the last decade. In particular, extreme temperatures can affect the power network in three levels: generation, transmission and distribution. For instance, during a heatwave the efficiency and output of power plants will decrease, and the transmission lines will operate at their limits. This happens while the demands in the distribution side will increase above the usual peak. Planning for such events require careful operation and planning of the entire system. In this paper, an optimal operation strategy is proposed for transmission systems under the heatwave exposure taking into consideration the impacts of hourly temperature on load profiles and available capacity and efficiency of renewable and non-renewable power generations, transmission lines capacity, and load curtailment. The proposed approach has been applied to capture the impacts of the heatwave event occurred in the state of Texas in August 2011. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed operation strategy in quantifying the impact of heatwaves on the transmission network operation.