Risk-driven Planning for System Upgrades to Enhance Resilience of Distribution Systems

Resilience to high impact low probability (HILP) weather events is an increasing concern to address the vulnerabilities of the aging power distribution infrastructures. It is essential to improve distribution system's resilience using appropriate planing measures such as infrastructure hardening or standby resources. Absence of regulatory policies have made it extremely challenging for distribution system operators (DSOs) to plan system upgrades for enhancing resilience. This paper presents a novel framework to plan investments for resilience-driven system upgrades. The framework quantifies the value of service for the upgrades in terms of the monetary value-at-risk due to customer interruption. The socio-economic optimal level for resilience-driven investments is computed through the marginal investment cost for system upgrades and the resulting marginal value of service. The proposed framework is validated for deploying distributed generators (DGs) as a planning measure to enhance resilience using a modified IEEE 123-bus test system. Results from the test-case demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework to facilitate DSOs in investment decisions for enhancing resilience that is driven by the risks posed by the HILP events and the socio-economic costs of planning measures.