Utilising energy storage systems to mitigate power system vulnerability

Vulnerability mitigation is one of the most important issues for power system planning and operation. Recent research reveals that energy storage systems (ESSs) have a great potential to be used to mitigate power system vulnerability. However, their benefits greatly depend on the locations and capacities of ESSs installed. Therefore this study aims to find the optimal locations and capacities of ESSs for power system vulnerability mitigation. A vulnerability assessment is proposed in this study to calculate the impact factors for power systems based on generator and line outages. A bus impact severity (BIS) analysis is then designed and used to find the vulnerable buses in the power system. Formulations of optimal locations and capacities for ESS placement are derived and solved by a genetic algorithm-based method. Since better locations for ESS placement can be found, the search space for ESS placement can be reduced effectively. Accordingly, the computational time for finding the optimal solution can be saved and the possibility to obtain a global optimum solution can be improved. Test results show that the proposed method can be used to find the optimal locations and capacities for ESS placement and mitigate system vulnerability effectively.