Two-stage power restoration strategy incorporating virtual power plants under natural disasters

Frequent power outages in distribution networks are often caused by extreme natural disasters. By dispatching distributed resources through virtual power plants, it is possible to help address issues such as partial line damage and insufficient po wer supply in post-disaster distribution networks, enabling rapid recovery after disasters. This paper proposes a two-stage power restoration strategy for resilient distribution networks under natural disaster scenarios, based on the coordinated utilizati on of various distributed resources. In the pre-disaster stage, an emergency warehouse location model is established with the objective of minimizing the weighted expected power outage, while virtual power plants are used to dispatch electric vehicles. In the post-disaster stage, virtual power plants first dispatch electric vehicles to provide emergency support for the distribution network operation, followed by the rapid restoration of power supply through repair crews and mobile energy storage systems. Finally, various schemes are designed to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.