Transmission-Distribution Coordination for Enhancing Grid Resiliency Against Flood Hazards

Flooding poses a significant threat to power system infrastructures, especially substations, causing widespread outages. Prior preventive actions can avert significant financial losses and prolonged disruptions. Protecting electrical substations by Tiger Dams before flooding is a temporary yet effective solution to improve power grid resiliency. Nonetheless, resource constraints prevent the protection of all substations. This article proposes a two-stage stochastic optimization problem for proactive substation protection within both transmission and distribution systems, aiming to optimize grid resilience with a set of short-term operational actions. Transmission and distribution substation protection actions are coordinated to obtain a more effective protection scheme against flooding. A flood-aware optimal power flow is incorporated into the optimization model taking into account flood-related constraints coupling transmission and distribution systems. The possibility of transferring load through normally open switches of distribution systems is added to the model. The optimization problem is linearized and cast as a mixed-integer linear program. The efficiency of the proposed model is tested on a 24-bus system containing 24 transmission substations and 40 distribution substations.