Case Study: Resilience Benefits of Distributed Wind Against Fuel and Weather Hazards in Alaska

In this case study of St. Mary's Village, Alaska, we present a resilience evaluation exercise. A resilience framework is employed to identify system characteristics, relevant metrics, and resilience hazards, and to assess the performance against the hazards with and without a distributed wind turbine. The results show the resilience benefits provided by the distributed wind installation against fuel shortage hazards and cold weather hazards. The resilience benefits can be assigned monetary values, which provide insight into value streams of distributed wind that are not usually considered. For example, the single 900 kW turbine was found to prevent an average of 14,643 kWh of load from being dropped during a two-day diesel fuel shortage event, which saved the community $447,592 by preventing outages. This case study is an example of novel power system resilience analysis and builds understanding of resilience hazards in power systems.