Resilience Assessment of Distribution Systems Considering the Effect of Hurricanes

High wind speeds during hurricanes cause damage to power distribution lines resulting in power outages that last from days to months, depending on the severity of the storm. This highlights the need for accurate risk assessment procedures for decision making purposes. This paper presents a framework for assessing the hurricane resilience of power distribution systems considering the impact of protective devices on reconfiguration and restoration of the distribution network. The framework is applied to an actual distribution network composed of 7051 wood poles located in southeast of the US. Results indicate that for the distribution network reconfiguration is not effective as there is not enough redundancy in the system. However, by considering the repair prioritization and assigning enough number of repair crews, the system can recover quickly.