Power economic dispatch against extreme weather conditions: The price of resilience

With climate change, we have been witnessing more frequent extreme weather events causing increasingly common large-scale power outages. It is essential and urgent to improve power system resilience, which also substantially impacts the resilience of dependent infrastructures, such as water and health systems. This work investigates the enhancement of power grid resilience using proactive network-constrained economic dispatch (NCED) strategies. An extreme weather event is modeled as an attacker interdicting a selected set of transmission lines to cause overloading of remaining lines, which potentially leads to cascading failures. We define a set of resilience metrics, with the first one being a weighted number of overloaded lines immediately after the attack to capture the potential cascading chain effect, the second one predicting the worst-case value of the first metric to provide a forward-looking evaluation, and the last one assessing whether each line can be overloaded in the worst case to supply more granular awareness. We also propose a defender–attacker–defender NCED model solved by a column-and-constraint generation algorithm to optimize the defined metrics. The model can generate strategies that (1) enhances resilience without additional NCED cost; (2) further enhances resilience with a budgeted extra NCED cost; and (3) achieves a moving target defense scheme shifting the grid’s vulnerable part(s). The associated price of resilience is specifically evaluated. Results on standard test systems demonstrate the proposed methods’ effectiveness. Overall, our methods and results provide insights on the establishment of social, economic and environmental resilience by contributing to the resolution of resilience-related power and energy issues.