Impacts of Remedial Action Schemes on Power System Resilience After Large-Scale Earthquakes

Damage from an earthquake can devastate a region and have a broad impact on the interconnected system. Significant loss of load and generation following an earthquake has the potential to cause failure of an entire interconnected system. This paper builds off previous Quasi-Steady-State (QSS) simulation results with analysis of potential Remedial Action Schemes (RAS) based on their ability to enhance grid resilience following a major earthquake. Using a synthetic model of the North America western power grid, a Monte Carlo QSS simulation is used to estimate the damage, recovery and the impact of RAS on load served following a major earthquake off the west coast of the United States. Three relatively simple RAS are investigated: load shedding, intentional islanding, and a combination of both are evaluated against a base case with no preventative actions taken. Results show that in heavy damage scenarios (95
^th
percentile), all RAS outperform the base case. The combination of islanding and load shedding improves the resilience of load served by 92%. In low-to-moderate damage scenarios, 5
^th
and 50
^th
percentiles, RAS shows similar performance to the base case.