The call for papers for the CIRED Chicago Workshop 2024 is now closed.
Power systems are evolving due to the increasing energy usage per capita as well as the increasing role of electricity in addressing our energy needs. As the organic growth of communities led to expansion of power system footprint geographically, especially that of transmission and distribution systems, the need for managing this aging system became more prominent. While inspections, proactive maintenance, failure analysis, and similar efforts were developed for improving asset health, system availability, and reliability in general, metrics were still needed to showcase and benchmark improvements. This led to the development and adoption of reliability indices, enabling us to track system needs, prioritize investments, and monetize benefits.
The concept of power system resilience has since received attention as it encompasses service availability beyond what distribution reliability considers. While certain incidents such as weather events may be excluded in reporting reliability, resilience considers availability of service to the customers even when disruptions that are wider in area, longer in duration, or stronger in impact hit power systems. Distribution systems, as the most critical part of power systems with highest impact on customer perception of the service, have yet to receive their fair share of attention in terms of creating metrics for tracking investments and in improving and benchmarking resilience. This workshop aims at taking us one step further toward this goal.
The call for papers is now closed. If you wish to submit an abstract as late submission, contact us and we will let you know if it is still possible to include your work.
Authors will be notified about acceptance on May 22.
The first step toward the broader goal of increasing distribution resilience is to understand the fundamentals including: what it means, what the disrupting events may be, and how they may impact the distribution system. Further, there is the need to quantify these relationships, enabling cost-benefit evaluations to facilitate adoption of this concept in planning, operation, and maintenance decisions.
While metrics, KPIs, and quantification in general will help monitor and justify the investments, the improvements may range from hardening the system, better event preparation, microgrids and use of energy systems, and more. This track covers the tools for improving resilience.
While still under development, the concept of resilience in distribution systems has seen implementation cases in utilities, whether required by regulators to reduce risks, such as the case for wildfires, or inspired by the need to prioritize investment to not only include reliability but also reduce societal impact of wider, longer, and stronger events and their resulting interruptions.