Grid Resilience Enhancement Under Extreme Heat Wave Events

ABSTRACT

The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have increased notably over the last decades, posing significant challenges to the reliability and resilience of electric power infrastructure. Low‐frequency high‐impact (LFHI) extreme weather events such as heat waves can severely stress power distribution systems which lead to increased load demand and reduced line capacity, with a higher risk of cascading outages. Ensuring the resilience of electric grid is thus critical for maintaining essential services and minimizing economic disruption. This paper addresses the increasing vulnerability of power distribution systems to LFHI heat waves and presents a comprehensive probabilistic simulation framework to improve grid resilience by efficiently integrating residential PV generation and BESS. This involves development of a novel line‐failure probability matrix to identify and rank thermally stressed branches that guide fault injections for critical contingency scenarios. Through three major case studies, that is, for DER‐integrated grid, PV penetration at 25%, 50% and 75% in coordination with BESS, test results demonstrate that DER dispatch that are optimized across PV availability, BESS state‐of‐charge, voltage support and frequency regulation can effectively mitigate voltage instability and suppress cascading failures.