Strengthening Urban Power Grids: A Resilient Planning Approach to Improve Critical Load Survival in Extreme Events

Extreme disasters can damage power infrastructure of urban power grids and lead to significant outages. Strengthening urban power grids by updating and building new lines, stations, and sources in planning stage can enhance the power grid resilience, thus improve critical load survival in extreme events. This paper proposes a planning approach to strength the urban power grid and improve resilience. First, the planning principles on the power supply to critical loads are proposed to ensure power service based on differentiated critical degree of loads. Second, the planning problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear program (MILP), maximizing the weighted number of critical loads with guaranteed power supply considering the length of power supply paths and minimizing planning budgets. The associated constraints on planning principles and budget limit are considered. Finally, the proposed method is validated on a practical multi-voltage level grid case. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method enables each critical load to receive multiple power supplies based on its importance which can help survive in extreme events.