Resilience Planning Simulation Framework for Strom Hardening and Recovery

Resilience improvements represent major strategic objectives of any critical infrastructure sector, including electric power. Continuous improvement of power system resilience requires a well-thought strategic vision, well-executed action plans, an effective mechanism for allocation of capital and prioritization of resilience investment options under financial constraints. Electric utilities respond to storm events that affects the continuity of power supply. Since resilience investments directly affect the number and duration of outages in the aftermath of an adverse event, the avoided cost of restoration needs to be considered in assessing the cost-benefit of investments. Investments and improvements to the restoration process are complementary to, and at times an alternative to, investment in grid hardening, and for that reason they must be considered as they are directly correlated to the cost and duration of the restoration process. In this paper, we have first outlined a typical utility restoration process and proposed key resilience metrics that can be used to capture the benefits of resilience investments. Following, we have proposed a resilience optimization framework that can potentially enable electric utilities to strategically plan for and efficiently respond to historically low-probability, high-consequence disruptive events that are now happening with increasing frequency. Finally, the paper also introduces a case study that captures the operational investments in improvements to the restoration process.