Identifying Critical Elements to Enhance the Power Grid Resilience

The resilience of a power system refers to its ability to resist and recover from multiple physical failures under extreme operation conditions. In this paper, we study the power grid resilience considering different time scales of recovery strategies and propose a method for identifying critical elements whose physical damage can significantly degrade the resilience of a power system. The maximum power supply (MPS) of the remaining network containing the elements that are not physically damaged is obtained and used to indicate the resilience performance of the system. We identify the critical elements in the grid by iteratively selecting and removing the link with the lowest MPS. We do simulations in the IEEE 118 Bus case to evaluate the grid resilience under various extremes and test the proposed strategy. Simulation results validate the efficacy of our proposed method in the identification of critical elements.