Research on Power Grid Resilience and Power Supply Restoration during Disasters-A Review

Electric power system plays an indispensable role in modern society, which supplies the energy to residential, commercial, and industrial consumers. However, the high-impact and low-probability natural disasters (i.e., windstorm, typhoon, and flood) come more frequent because of the climate change in the recent years, which may sequentially cause devastating damages to the infrastructure of power systems. The aim of this paper is mainly to explore and review the resilience of power grid system during the disaster and the power supply management strategies to recover the power grid. Firstly, the category of natural disasters and different influences on power grid are discussed. Then, the definition of power grid resilience is explored and the supply management strategies copying with disasters are introduced, such as microgrids and distributed generation systems. Specially, the electric vehicles (EVs) equipped with large-capacity battery pack in the transportation network can also be considered as the distributed power sources with mobility. Thus, the conceptual frameworks of integrating large-scale EVs into the power grid to fasten restoration of the power systems in the pre-disaster/post-disaster are emphatically investigated in this paper. Finally, the opportunities and challenges in further research on employing EVs for emergency power supply in the extreme weather events are also discussed.