Resilient Transmission Planning of the Ecuadorian Power System Against Earthquakes

Redundancy and hardening of components in transmission systems are practices to improve system resilience against possible adverse consequences caused by natural hazards. However, power systems planners do not usually recognize the natural hazards, so-called high-impact low-probability (HILP) events, within network investment decisions. The situation is exacerbated by an increase in the frequency and severity of power system blackouts due to HILP-type events. In this context, this paper proposes a planning problem for investment in transmission lines and hardening of substations to improve the resilience of power system considering the outage scenarios originated by earthquakes. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach. Furthermore, a probabilistic methodology is used to simulate the hazard and its impacts on the power system. Our proposal is applied on the Ecuadorian transmission system. The results demonstrate that hardening substations and investment in lines can significantly contribute towards enhancing resilience to high impact exogenous natural hazards.