DER Allocation and Line Repair Scheduling for Storm-induced Failures in Distribution Networks

Abstract

Electricity distribution networks (DNs) in many regions are increasingly subjected to disruptions caused by tropical storms. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) can act as temporary supply sources to sustain "microgrids" resulting from disruptions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of suitable DER allocation to facilitate more efficient repair operations and faster recovery. First, we estimate the failure probabilities of DN components (lines) using a stochastic model of line failures which parametrically depends on the locationspecific storm wind field. Next, we formulate a two-stage stochastic mixed integer program, which models the distribution utility's decision to allocate DERs in the DN (pre-storm stage); and accounts for multi-period decisions on optimal dispatch and line repair scheduling (post-storm stage). A key feature of this formulation is that it jointly optimizes electricity dispatch within the individual microgrids and the line repair schedules to minimize the sum of the cost of DER allocation and cost due to lost load. To illustrate our approach, we use the sample average approximation method to solve our problem for a small-size DN under different storm intensities and DER/crew constraints.

Probabilistic Modeling of Hurricane Wind-Induced Damage in Infrastructure Systems

“…Accurate estimation of spatially-varying damage minimizes risk by not only improving the optimality of proactive strategies, but also by increasing the e ciency of damage localization and repair. For instance, a plethora of works address optimal proactive allocation of distributed energy resources (DERs) (Gao, Chen, Mei, Huang, & Xu, 2017;Sedzro, Lamadrid, & Zuluaga, 2018;Chang, Shelar, & Amin, 2018 in distribution feeders of electric power infrastructure; our work is readily applicable to the proposed methods in these works. Indeed, research demonstrates that energy customers are willing to pay for back-up electricity services during large outages of long duration (Baik, Davis, Park, Sirinterlikci, & Morgan, 2020).…”

Stochastic Resource Allocation for Electricity Distribution Network Resilience

“…As shown in Fig. 3, we first obtain an upper bound to (SP2) using the greedy approach, then solve (SP2) with the cut (12) as an added constraint. Then, we use the solution to (SP2) in order to solve (SPC) and obtain a Benders cut (Sec.…”

“…Sec. II summarizes our modeling approach for improving resilience of DNs against tropical storms [12]. The approach jointly considers proactive pre-storm decisions (DER allocation) and post-storm response actions of microgrid formation, component repairs, and DER dispatch (see Fig.…”

“…In this paper, we assume the probability distribution P as given. We refer the reader to [12] for details on estimating P. We now describe our models for allocation (a), repair (y s ), and dispatch (x s ) actions, and the objective functions for both the stages; see Table I for a summary of notation.…”

“…12 out of 36 randomly-chosen nodes have one load each. We otherwise use the same parameters as in our previous work[12].…”