Comparing a New Power System Preventive Operation Method with a Conventional Industry Practice during Hurricanes

Extreme weather is a leading cause of power outages in the U.S., and preventive operation is an effective approach to reduce outages in the operations phase. Currently, a common industry practice for preventive operation is to turn on all the units in a system during extreme weather. In this study, a preventive unit commitment (UC) model is presented to reduce transmission-induced outages during hurricanes. In this model, transmission contingency scenarios are generated based on wind speed, and then these scenarios are used in a stochastic UC model to obtain UC results with a goal of reducing outages in the system. The presented preventive operations method is compared with the business-as-usual model and the turn-on-all-units method, and results show that the presented method can reduce outages from the business-as-usual model as effective as the turn-on-all-units method with a much lower operating cost.