A Strategic Urban Grid Planning Tool to Improve the Resilience of Smart Grid Networks

Abstract

The unresponsive and poor resilience of the traditional city architecture may cause instability and failure. Therefore, strategical positioning of new urban electricity or city components do not only make the city more resilient to electricity outages, but also a step towards a greener and a smarter city. Money and resilience are two conflicting goals in this case. In case of blackouts, distributed energy resources can serve critical demand to essential city components such as hospitals, water purification facilities, fire and police stations. In addition, the city level stakeholders may need to envision monetary saving and the overall urban planning resilience related to city component changes. In order to provide decision makers with resilience and monetary information, it is needed to analyze the impact of modifying the city components. This paper introduces a novel tool suitable for this purpose and reports on the validation efforts through a stakeholder workshop. The outcomes indicate that predicted outcomes of two alternative solutions can be analyzed and compared with the assistance of the tool.