Resilience Analysis of a Distribution System During Major Events

The proliferation of climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly more common and more severe. With this motivation, this paper analyzes and compares the performance of an electric distribution system owner and operator during two category 5 hurricanes with different characteristics, using historical data like customers affected, outage numbers and hours on outage. The path of the first hurricane covered only part of the utility territory but still had a significant impact, while the second one, which happened merely days later, had a much more devastating effect as its path was directly through the utility territory, affecting a wider region of the already debilitated system. The historical data provide insight on the impact these events had on the electric utility and its customers, as well as it is an indicator of an overall system condition and performance. Also, the paper uses the data to create resilience curves and compare their shapes to the literature suggested patterns. The financial impacts were also extrapolated using quantifications of the value of lost load (VOLL). We conclude that the system health prior to an event plays a major role in its fragility.