Resilience of Digitalized Power Systems – Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Power systems are undergoing a transition from centralized generation to distributed renewable generation. That calls for more flexibility in balancing generation and consumption because distributed energy resources in most cases rely on weather-dependent resources and can, therefore, only be controlled to a certain degree. The necessary flexibility can be achieved by introducing digitalization into the energy system. However, digitalization also leads to new vulnerabilities of the power system and increases its complexity. Additionally, the often rapid and unforeseeable development of information and communication technology introduces a new level of uncertainty in the system design. These circumstances make it necessary to shift from a classical design of robust to the design of resilient power systems that are able to anticipate, react to, and recover from them. In this paper, these real-time attributes of a resilient digitalized power system are analyzed with respect to potential measures: an enhanced situational awareness, virtualization, flexibilization, and a distributed blackstart. The measures tackle different challenges for resilient digitalized power systems and cover different phases of the resilience process, visualized in the so-called resilience bathtub curve. The implementation of these measures can increase the resilience of a digitalized power system and are meant to be combined with further, also non-real-time measures.