A Framework for Evaluation of Power Grid Resilience Case Study: 2016 South Australian Blackout

Abstract

Evaluation of a system resilience has a multidimensional nature that includes multifarious qualitative and quantitative aspects. This paper focuses on energy resilience in power systems and presents a novel quantitative metric, which aims to quantify the entire system behavior from pre-outage to post-outage stage. On September 28 2016, fierce tornado and lightning strikes caused multiple faults on the South Australian (SA) transmission system and led to a blackout in the entire state of South Australia. Load restoration data related to this event is collected from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and is considered as the case study in this work. The proposed metric is applied to the real-world restoration data related to this disruptive event to measure and evaluate energy resilience in the SA grid. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed framework in energy-resilience optimization is shown by detailed resilience-oriented problem formulation in power grids.