Power system flexibility and resiliency

Abstract

The flexibility of the power system can be described with its ability on providing dynamic and adaptable structure against the various circumstances. It requires balancing the power supply and demand in terms of intervals such as minute or hourly. The flexibility of power system, which is a critical driver, is the fast and assorted deployment of distributed sources such as hydro, wind, solar etc. The early challenges of the flexibility researches are focused on rapid deployment of distributed generation while the followings are related to pricing, standards, policies, and microgrid (MG) integration to power system that includes customer adoption. The environmental policies, subsidies and similar factors may constrain the power system management in terms of generation. Therefore, the power system characteristic changes to distributed generation searches instead of conventional generation. It may also shift consumers to energy generators by using their micro sources as solar plants, hybrid electric vehicles and smart appliances. The alteration to more flexible power system involves novel technologies and methods to sustain the security of the network. On the other hand, the resiliency of a power system requires the ability to increase the security of power system against extreme conditions. The main interest on resiliency is caused by significant weather conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. Such weather events are defined as high impact and low frequency events. Moreover, increased communication and monitoring infrastructures have raised the cyber security concerns in the aspects of resiliency. Therefore, the resiliency of power systems requires to be handled in terms of physical and cyber damages. The resiliency is researched in three main topics as damage prevention, system recovery, and survivability of power system. These topics are studied in generation, transmission, distribution and consumer sections with its all drivers.