Seismic-Resilient Electric Power Distribution Systems: Harnessing the Mobility of Power Sources

Mobile power sources (MPSs), including mobile emergency generators, truck-mounted mobile energy storage systems, and electric vehicles, have great potentials to be employed as grid-support resources during power grid emergency operating conditions to supply the critical loads and enhance the resilience of distribution system (DS) via a swift disaster restoration. We here investigate the MPS dispatch (i.e., routing and scheduling) in coordination with DS dynamic network reconfiguration. We propose a two-stage restoration scheme to facilitate the DS restoration following the high-impact low-probability (HILP) seismic disasters. In the first stage, a seismic hazard is simulated through a Monte Carlo simulation engine to estimate the unavailability of power distribution branches under a suite of seismic force scenarios. In the second stage, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) optimization model is formulated for DS restoration that cooptimizes the routing and scheduling of MPSs and DS dynamic network reconfiguration. The MINLP model is then linearized to a mixed-integer linear programming model to reduce the computation complexity, where the seismic-resilience recovery strategies are generated at different timescales. The efficacy of the proposed method is evaluated on the IEEE 33-node test system and the results verify a significant reduction in the load outages and an improved power system resilience to HILP earthquakes.