Resilience-Oriented Transmission Expansion Planning under Hurricane Impact Considering Vulnerable Line Identification and Hardening

Resilient enhancement measures are crucial for increasing systems' capacities to deal with extreme natural disasters. However, in the pre-disaster prevention stage of hurricanes, research that simultaneously considers load importance, vulnerable lines, and multiple resilience enhancement measures is lacking. To address this issue, a novel resilience-oriented transmission expansion planning (ROTEP) model is proposed that incorporates two resilience assessment indices: the combined loss of loads (CLL) and the vulnerable line survival proportion (VLSP). In addition, the novel function of the proposed model meets the requirements of normal and hurricane damage scenarios based on the collaborative implementation of three resilience enhancement measures (expansion planning, hardening, and unit commitment). The proposed ROTEP model is structured in two stages. The first-stage model aims to meet the load growth demand while minimizing the total planning cost of transmission lines, the operating cost of generators, and the penalty cost of wind power and load shedding across several normal scenarios. Based on the scheme obtained from the first-stage model, damage scenarios are constructed, and a fault chain set is formulated using a hurricane simulation model. Then, a cascading fault graph is constructed to identify vulnerable lines. The second-stage model further enhances the CLL and VLSP (if necessary) under several damage scenarios by hardening the highest-contributing or most vulnerable line. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed ROTEP model for enhancing resilience is validated with a modified IEEE RTS-24 system and a two-area IEEE RTS-1996 system.