Spatiotemporal Impact Assessment of Hurricanes on Electric Power Systems

Severe windstorms such as hurricanes are the primary cause of extensive power grid damages resulting in widespread customer outages and expensive recovery. This paper aims to develop a probabilistic impact assessment framework to model and quantify the spatiotemporal impacts of windstorms such as hurricanes on the bulk power grid. The variations in hurricane trajectory and wind speed are modeled using historical data from past events in the US. The impacts of individual power grid components are modeled using fragility curves typically obtained using historical outage data. Finally, the system losses are modeled using a loss metric quantifying the total load disconnected due to the impact of the hurricane as it travels inland. The simulation is performed on the 2000-bus synthetic Texas grid mapped on the geographical footprint of Texas. The simulation results show that the loss increases significantly for a few time steps when the hurricane's wind field is intense and saturates gradually when the hurricane's intensity decays while traversing further inland.