Flood-aware Optimal Power Flow for Proactive Day-ahead Transmission Substation Hardening

Abstract: Power system components, particularly electrical substations, may be severely damaged due to flooding, resulting in prolonged power outages and resilience degradation. This problem is more severe in low-elevated regions such as Louisiana. Protective operational actions such as placing tiger dams around substations before flooding can reduce substation vulnerability, damage costs, and energy not supplied cost, thus enhancing power grid resilience. This paper proposes a stochastic mixed-integer programming model for protecting transmission substations one day before flood events using tiger dams. A flood-aware optimal power flow problem is formulated for transmission system operators with respect to the protected/unprotected status of substations. The formulated model aims to identify critical substations whose protection maximizes grid resilience. The output of the proposed model is a day-ahead crew team schedule for installing tiger dams on transmission substations. The effectiveness of the proposed model is evaluated on a 6-bus system, and promising results are obtained.