Multi-dimensional hurricane resilience assessment of electric power systems

Abstract Electric power systems are critical to economic prosperity, national security, public health and safety. However, in hurricane-prone areas, a severe storm may simultaneously cause extensive component failures in a power system and lead to cascading failures within it and across other power-dependent utility systems. Hence, the hurricane 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 hurricane resilience of contemporary electric power systems. This approach includes a hurricane hazard model, component fragility models, a power system performance model, and a system restoration model. These coupled four models enable quantifying hurricane resilience and estimating economic losses. Taking as an example the power system in Harris County, Texas, USA, along with real outage and restoration data after Hurricane Ike in 2008, the proposed resilience assessment model is calibrated and verified. In addition, several dimensions of resilience as well as the effectiveness of alternative strategies for resilience improvement are simulated and analyzed. Results show that among technical, organizational and social dimensions of resilience, the organizational resilience is the highest with a value of 99.964% (3.445 in a proposed logarithmic scale) while the social resilience is the lowest with a value of 99.760% (2.620 in the logarithmic scale). Although these values seem high in absolute terms due to the reliability of engineered systems, the consequences of departing from ideal resilience are still high as economic losses can add up to $83 million per year.