Strategic dispatch of electric buses for resilience enhancement of urban energy systems

The increasing frequency of the occurrence of high impact low probability (HILP) disruptive events has posed huge threats to the power system. Therefore, power system resilience improvement has drawn world-wide attention. Electric buses (EB) are equipped with a large capacity of batteries which could provide sufficient energy and capacity values to run islanded micro-grids (MG) for hours, with a particular focus on V2G, which will deliver system resilience during extreme operational conditions. In this paper, an innovative reciprocal transport-power system coordination scheme is proposed to simultaneously mitigate the adverse impacts on both systems. By using this economic incentive-free approach, EBs are endogenously motivated to provide resilience-oriented V2G service to the power system, while increasing the transport service survivability during HILP disruptive events. Additionally, a novel EB dispatch rescheduling method considering the trade-off of both the requirement of energy supply security and transport service fulfilment is proposed. By using this method, the essential load curtailment of local MGs can be further alleviated, while the impacts of reduced charging service on transport service can also be further mitigated. Through a series of case studies, we illustrate that EBs have significant potential to provide resilience enhancement to the urban energy system based on appropriate dispatch strategies. Meanwhile, the interests of the power system and the transport system can be well reconciled by using the proposed approach during HILP disruptive events.