Boosting the Power Grid Resilience to Extreme Weather Events Using Defensive Islanding

Abstract

Several catastrophic experiences of extreme weather events show that boosting the power grid resilience is becoming increasingly critical. This paper discusses a unified resilience evaluation and operational enhancement approach, which includes a procedure for assessing the impact of severe weather on power systems and a novel risk-based defensive islanding algorithm. This adaptive islanding algorithm aims to mitigate the cascading effects that may occur during weather emergencies. This goes beyond the infrastructure-based measures that are traditionally used as a defense to severe weather. The resilience assessment procedure relies on the concept of fragility curves, which express the weath..