Resiliency, an Answer to Existing Passive Defense Concerns About the Classical Reliability-Oriented View in Electric Power Networks

Power systems have been traditionally designed and operated based on the main principles of reliability, i.e. security and adequacy. These principles can properly deal with identified failures in the power infrastructure components. However, recently occurred high impact low-probability (HILP) threats have raised the concerns about the classical reliability-oriented view. As a critical infrastructure, power systems are more and more expected to be resilient to HILPs. So, the related governmental organizations put their endeavors to enhance the resiliency of these networks against HILPs. For this purpose, there is a great need to identify different threats and evaluate their impacts. The investigation of different threats, identification of different ways to enhance the resiliency and finally introducing smart grid concept as an efficient way to increase the resiliency of the distribution networks are reviewed in this paper.