PULLMAN, Wash. – A model developed by Washington State University researchers can help utilities better prepare and plan for extreme weather to limit power outages.
The researchers from WSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science developed a planning framework that translates extreme weather impacts to power grid disruptions and assesses long-term investment strategies for improved resilience. The work could help utilities optimize distributed generation, treatment of power lines, and grid hardening decisions, and evaluate potential investments to minimize the risk of power outages. The work has been published in the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Generation, Transmission, and Distribution.
“The main goal of this work is to understand how a weather event impacts the power grid, and how we can better plan the grid for similar events in the future,” said Anamika Dubey, Huie-Rogers Endowed Chair and associate professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The central challenge is the long-term planning problem. The grid is a large interconnected critical infrastructure, and grid planners need to evaluate multiple interconnected decisions often years or decades in advance while accounting for significant uncertainties.”
In recent years, the frequency of extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires and heat and cold waves, has risen significantly due to climate change. In the past five years, there have been an average of 23 weather events in the U.S. where damages exceeded $1 billion, up from an average of nine in past decades, and that number is expected to increase. Utility companies are studying and planning investments for transmission and power systems to avoid disruption to power supply when facing these kinds of events.
“They have started resilience-oriented initiatives, such as line upgrades, line hardening, and distributed generation deployment to mitigate impact of severe weather events,” said Shishir Lamichhane, a co-author on the paper who recently received a PhD in electrical engineering. “However, these measures are often planned separately rather than together within an integrated, risk-based framework. We need new ideas and different kinds of tools to support resilience planning.”
The researchers developed a two-stage risk-based optimization framework to address the challenge, focusing on long-term planning rather than short-term operational response or preparedness, and examining how different risk profiles would influence investment decisions for the power systems.
“We were trying to assess how weather events, specifically wind events, would impact the transmission and distribution grids, and what kind of investments would make more sense if we were to reduce the associated impact of those events on the power grid,” said Abodh Poudyal, lead author on the work and a recent PhD graduate in electrical engineering.
The researchers came up with a probabilistic model that draws on past events to predict potential impacts from future extreme weather. Their model maps weather events to grid impacts and quantifies cost-benefit trade-offs of possible solutions. They provide methods for utilities to tailor the framework to their specific systems using multi-year outage and weather datasets.
“Once we have that, we understand that if this is how the grid gets impacted, then this is the impact on people in terms of outages, damages, and cost, or the resilience challenge that they might face,” said Dubey, who holds a joint appointment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Then the researchers tackled the second part of the equation, laying out steps for utilities to take.
“If you have a portfolio of solutions, such as hardening a line, installing some devices, or adding distributed generators to make it more robust, how should you do that?” said Dubey. “So, we asked if you could quantify the benefits and cost of these solutions that some stakeholder who is studying this problem can use?”
The researchers tested and validated their model on mock power grids, and they are beginning to use the framework in utilities around the U.S. to translate it to real-world data.
“That’s why this framework is useful because it’s not telling you that this is the solution that you should implement – it’s actually helping you evaluate the cost-benefit trade-off of the solution, so that you can come up with a portfolio that makes sense for your system,” said Dubey.
A specific solution probably will vary from region to region and from event to event.
“The general takeaway is that the framework can help you choose the solution for your region or for your problem,” she said.
The work was funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation CAREER Program.
Media Contacts
- Anamika Dubey, WSU School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 509-335-1865, anamika.dubey@wsu.edu
- Shawn Vestal, WSU News & Media Relations, shawn.vestal@wsu.edu
