Dartmouth Events

“Resilience and response to high impact events: From energy system operators to households”

Alberto J. Lamadrid, Lehigh University

The increased incidence of extreme events and the associated socio-economic losses due to power outages during the last decades are evidence that enhancing the ability to rapidly restore the functionality of the power system is a fundamental concern for operators and planners. Moreover, extreme events lead to situations in which populations are faced with the decision to evacuate more often.

For system operators, the inherent uncertainty of these extreme events makes the solution to the economic restoration of the electricity network's with network constraints challenging. In particular, the allocation of resources to quickly restore the system requires to make decisions in terms of what demands to serve and how to reconfigure the system dynamically.

For households, there is a body of literature studying issues related to evacuation and disruptions due to these natural hazards, including the perspective of the agencies in charge, businesses that may see disruptions in their supply chains, and residents faced with the prospect of having to leave their homes.

In this talk we study these two intertwined problems. For the system operator problem, we propose and develop a model to deal with the restoration process of future power systems, embedding some of the characteristics these systems are likely to have. More specifically, our formulation can deal with radial and meshed topologies, and it requires little pre-processing of the input data. Additionally, we extend the model to allow for possible mobile and fixed distributed generation technologies and distributed energy resources, and explicitly include demand responsive loads with a minimum satisfiability constraint. Thus, this extended formulation can be used as an operation and a short-term planning tool for the Distributed Generation (DG) scenario-based location problem.

For the household problem we examine (1) the inter dependencies that affect the individual evacuation decision; (2) the characteristics of the decisions made by evacuees; and (3) the relationship between infrastructure and evacuation decisions, including the electricity system, the fuel and gas network, and health care services. We analyze infrastructure, economic and demographic factors affecting the decisions to evacuate, and study the behavior of evacuees.