Resilience of electrical power delivery system in response to natural disasters

The electric power transmission and distribution system is a complex and critical part of the national infrastructure. The transmission lines may span hundreds of miles, may include multiple generators and substations, and many key facilities are unguarded. They may be located in vulnerable geographic location and have been attacked by natural disasters. Because of complex nature of todays power system, fault in any link may propagate to cause cascading failure and ultimately blackout. Thus it is necessary to study impact of natural disaster on electrical power systems for understanding the causes of the blackouts, explore ways to prepare and harden the grid, and increase the resilience of the power grid under such events. This study is conducted in order to assess the resilience of Electrical Power Delivery System (EPDS) of IEEE 14 bus system. The resilience is assessed through different techniques like cascading failure analysis for assessing the hazard, risk quantification and ranking for measuring the hazard, and islanding operation and detection for managing the hazard at the post disaster stage. Cascading failure analysis is performed for standard IEEE 14 bus system to determine the optimum value of system tolerance. Similarly, risk quantification criterion is applied to IEEE 14 bus system to determine the line which is most critical to natural disasters taking probability and severity into account. Finally, islanding operation and detection technique is employed to ensure survivability of IEEE 14 bus system even with limited operation.