Transmission and Generation Expansion to Mitigate Seismic Risk

This paper develops a two-stage stochastic program and solution procedure to optimize the selection of capacity enhancement strategies to increase the resilience of electric power systems to earthquakes. The model explicitly considers the range of earthquake events that are possible and, for each, an approximation of the distribution of damage to be experienced. This is important because electric power systems are spatially distributed; hence their performance is driven by the distribution of damage to the components. We test this solution procedure against the nonlinear integer solver in LINGO 13 and apply the formulation and solution strategy to the Eastern Interconnect where the seismic hazard primarily stems from the New Madrid Seismic Zone. We show the feasibility of optimized capacity expansion to improve the resilience of large-scale power systems with respect to large earthquakes.