A framework to investigate the effectiveness of interconnection of power distribution systems subjected to hurricanes

Abstract

Billions of dollars lost to natural disasters such as hurricanes are associated with infrastructure damage and power interruptions. Most utilities have radially operated systems and the existing supporting infrastructure may not provide possibilities to restore power from other substations that are not within the disaster areas. This would lower reliability during hazards especially for customers that are downstream of affected parts of the system. A potential strategy to remedy such situations entails extending feeders from different substations in the vicinity and connecting them with affected feeder lines from other substations. This paper presents a framework to study the effectiveness of constructing additional lines with switching devices to connect feeders from different substations to improve system performance. The framework incorporates a hurricane hazard model, a topologically based system performance measure, and cost analysis. A notional power distribution system of parts of Florida is used to demonstrate the proposed framework. The results show that improvement in system performance achieved by constructing new lines depends largely on hurricane path, number of new lines constructed as well as the length of the new lines. Longer lines have a high probability of failure which leads to only marginal improvement in system performance and high construction cost.

Keywords:

• System performance
• reconfigurability
• fragility analysis
• hurricane risk
• power distribution system
• risk analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Chee-Wooi Ten for valuable discussion about the paper. They are also grateful to the editor and reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments that helped to immensely improve the paper. The research described in this paper was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Catalyzing New International Collaborations Program, and Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events Program under grant number NSF-1050443. This support is gratefully acknowledged. However, the writers take sole responsibility for the views expressed in this paper, which may not represent the position of the NSF or their respective institutions.