PhD Thesis Final Defense to be held on 22 March 2018 at 10:00


Trakas Thesis Image.

The examination is open to anyone who wishes to attend.

Thesis Title: Contribution to power system resilience assessment and enhancement

Abstract

Natural disasters can cause significant damage to power systems. These disasters are geological and meteorological phenomena, such as extreme weather events, earthquakes, floods and wildfires. In particular, such weather events in the past few years have resulted in major power disruptions around the world, leading to unplanned electricity interruptions lasting from a few hours to a few weeks. Despite the low probability of such events, their high impact on power systems and their financial cost make the development of models necessary in order to predict them, to assess their impact and finally to deal with them.

The present Ph.D dissertation focuses on power systems resilience enhancement against extreme weather events and wildfires. Resilience is the grid’s ability to withstand extraordinary and high-impact low-probability events that may have never been experienced before, rapidly recover from such disruptive events, and adapt its operation and structure to prevent or mitigate the impact of similar events in the future.

Specifically, resilience indicators and metrics are proposed in order to assess the impact of extreme events on power system, quantify its resilience and evaluate various smart operational and hardening measures.

Following, an online risk analysis, capable of providing an indication of the evolving risk of power systems regions subject to extreme weather events, is proposed. Furthermore, a unified resilience evaluation and operational enhancement approach, that includes the proposed online risk analysis for assessing the impact of severe weather on power systems and a novel risk-based defensive islanding algorithm, is presented.

Continuing, a tri-level problem is formulated to study the contribution of the unit commitment against an upcoming extreme weather event. Finally, an optimal distribution system operation for enhancing resilience against an approaching wildfire is presented.

Supervisor: Chatziargyriou Nikolaos, Professor

PhD student: Trakas Dimitrios