Collaborative Research: Proactive Recovery of Electric Power Assets for Resiliency Enhancement (PREPARE)

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This project aims at developing a comprehensive framework and the supporting theory for increasing resiliency of the critical electric power grid infrastructure in response to hurricanes and accordingly expediting recovery process for minimizing the associated economic, social, and physical disruptions. This research has profound impacts on local and national energy security, reliability, and sustainability by promoting the sound development of advanced techniques related to extreme weather events and natural disasters which are identified as the second cause of the largest blackouts in the United States. The project results will directly impact the society through helping electric power grid operators better manage available resources, reducing aftermath of hurricanes and other natural disasters, and accordingly saving billions of dollars in electric power grid outage and recovery related costs. This research will increase public awareness and facilitate the understanding of the complexity of hurricanes and the required recovery plans among stakeholders, ratepayers, regulators, utility executives, and market participants. Furthermore, this research will enable a rapid and wide-spread deployment of new technologies in smart grid, which will create substantial job opportunities in this area. In a broader scope, the project will promote teaching and training of future workforce, broaden participation of underrepresented groups, enhance research and education, and improve scientific and technological understanding via planned education and outreach activities as well as dissemination of findings to academia, industry, and the general public.In order to fulfill research objectives and present a significant change in current electric power grid response and recovery schemes, a framework for Proactive Recovery of Electric Power Assets for Resiliency Enhancement (PREPARE) will be developed. Within this framework, which will present the next generation decision making tool for proactive recovery, several coordinated models will be developed including (1) outage models to indicate the impact of hurricanes on power system components, (2) a stochastic pre-hurricane crew mobilization model for managing resources before the event, (3) a deterministic post-hurricane recovery model for managing resources after the event, and (4) outage and repair models to be incorporated in crew mobilization and recovery models. The models will be extended to ensure applicability to a variety of electric power grids with different technologies and regulatory issues. The stochastic pre-hurricane crew mobilization model will be developed using latest advances in mathematical optimization, which includes Monte Carlo Sampling, Recourse Modeling, and Chance Constraint Modeling, to find the best suited approach. The framework will be validated and its applicability to large-scale practical electric power grids will be verified by leveraging the data obtained from the electric utility collaborator of the project. The theoretical and practical implications of the developed results will push the research frontier of proactive response and recovery schemes in electric power grids. The transformative nature of this research supports application to a variety of infrastructures, and in response to a wide range of extreme weather events and natural disasters.