Resilience Assessment and Enhancement of China Southern Power Grid under Seismic Hazards

Safe and stable operation of electric power grids is critical to economic prosperity, national security, public health and safety. However, in earthquake-prone areas, a severe earthquake may simultaneously cause extensive component failures in a power grid and lead to cascading failures within it and across other power-dependent utility systems. Hence, the seismic resilience of power systems is crucial to ensure their rapid recovery and support the needs of the population in disaster areas. This paper introduces a probabilistic modeling approach for quantifying the seismic resilience of contemporary electric power grids. This approach includes an earthquake scenario generation model, component fragility models, a power grid performance model, and a system restoration model. These coupled four models enable quantifying seismic resilience. This paper applies the proposed approach to the seismic resilience assessment of the China Southern Power Grid, and several resilience strategies have been introduced to display how seismic resilience can be improved.