| dc.description.abstract | Natural gas has become a major source of energy over the last decade due to new extraction
techniques with overall lower costs, replacing more expensive existing coal power plants. As the natural gas infrastructure continues to expand, so does its interdependency with electricity generation infrastructure, creating crucial hotspots within the grid. Despite the continuous expansion and interconnectedness of the ERCOT grid, the interdependence between these two sectors led to cascading failures during high impact, low frequency (HILF) events as seen in Texas during February 2021.
The aftermath of the Texas February 2021 blackouts raised many questions regarding the electric grid’s reliability and resilience. Many papers have discussed the need for a well-defined resilience metric for power systems, yet most literature stops short of conducting a thorough analysis for a grid system. A grid resiliency metric has the potential to analyze how well a grid can handle extreme cold-weather events and can help identify improvements to prevent an event like this from occurring again.
In this research thesis, a brief overview of the Texas February 2021 event is provided to understand some of the underlying effects of grid failure and to highlight the interdependent nature of the natural gas and electricity sectors. A literature review to understand the difference and existing work surrounding the definitions and quantification of reliability and resilience in power systems is also conducted.
The main goal of this research is to visually identify the various aspects that make up the natural gas side of the ERCOT grid system to formulate a resilience metric at the coupling of natural gas and electricity systems. This work also contributes to the existing data repository from the 2021 Texas event for greater accessibility for future studies. This work applies the proposed resilience metric to the data from the 2021 event and discusses limitations, considerations, and methods to improve resiliency onsite. | |
