Resilient Transmission Hardening Planning in a High Renewable Penetration Era

Hardening components in transmission systems is a practice to improve system resilience against possible disturbances caused by natural disasters. In a power system with a very high penetration of renewable energy, the system hardening will be further complicated by the uncertainty and variability of renewable energy. In this paper, we study the transmission line hardening planing problem in the context of probabilistic power flows injected by the high penetration of renewable energy. We assume that the probabilistic information of renewable energy is incomplete and ambiguous and propose a data-driven approach to approximate the renewable uncertainty sets. We then extend the $N-1$ security criteria to multiple simultaneous contingencies and seek to prepare a hardening plan for the worst-case scenarios. A two-stage data-driven stochastic model is formulated by considering the joint worst-case wind output distribution and transmission line contingencies. Then, we apply the Column-and-Constraints generation method to solve the proposed model. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct experiments on 24-bus and 118-bus test systems. We numerically show that the data-driven approach can effectively address the uncertainty ambiguity and the proposed approach can produce effective hardening plans that improve the system resilience.