Siting of Electrical Substations for Flood Resilience: Identification of Hazards and Vulnerable Assets

Extreme weather events disrupt power-system assets, causing widespread and prolonged power outages. Proper siting of power-system assets can help stakeholders improve their resilience (i.e., the ability to withstand hazards and recover quickly from impacts) at the planning stage. However, resilience is context-dependent because different regions face distinct hazards and these damage power system assets differently. As such, the asset siting schemes for stakeholders involve a complex process of i) identifying hazards and vulnerable assets, ii) determining the failure mechanisms of assets under hazards and iii) weighing up the economic and social effectiveness involved in resilience enhancement measures. This paper will focus on the first step of the process, which is to demonstrate how to identify the most severe hazards (e.g., floods) and affected assets (e.g., substations), using Peninsular Malaysia as the study area. The results of this study can provide research objectives for the subsequent two steps: determining the failure mechanisms of assets subject to hazards, and developing resilience enhancement measures in the third step.