Visualization of Network Vulnerability During Extreme Weather Events for Situation Awareness Enhancement

Abstract

Extreme events, driven mainly by natural disasters and extreme weather, have severe impacts on the resilient operation of power systems. Adequate situation awareness during these events is essential to the implementation of those preventive and corrective actions that would improve network resilience. It is thus becoming increasingly important to quantify and visualize the network impacts of such extreme events, which would enhance the situation awareness of system operators. Within this context, this paper proposes a fragility-based probabilistic approach to firstly assess the impact of extreme weather events on network integrity and then generate heat maps for visualizing the spatiotemporal vulnerability of the network to the weather event. The application of the proposed approach using a simplified version of the Great Britain transmission network demonstrates that such a tool can benefit the situation awareness of the system operators, enabling their effective and timely response to such disastrous events.