QUIRCY: QUantum Integrated ResilienCY for Power Systems

The increasing frequency and severity of disruptive weather events, such as windstorms and other high-impact low-probability (HILP) occurrences, emphasize the critical necessity for enhanced preparedness and resilience strategies in power systems. Operators face significant challenges in optimally deploying mobile generating resources to areas experiencing outages of crucial infrastructure components, including generators, transmission lines, and transformers. These disruptions often compromise the reliability and stability of power delivery, necessitating temporary load shedding to ensure grid stability until full restoration is achieved. This paper introduces quantum integrated resiliency for power systems (QUIRCY), a new resilience approach aimed at optimizing resource allocation in power systems. The proposed framework integrates a two-level quantum algorithm that combines the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm for highly efficient quantum power flow analysis with quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) to strategically allocate distributed energy resources (DERs). The HHL algorithm significantly outperforms classical fast decoupled load flow (FDLF) methods by requiring only log 2 N qubits to effectively represent an N-dimensional system. Simulation case studies on IEEE test systems have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed quantum approach, indicating consistent convergence to optimal solutions under various severe system constraints. These results highlight the significant promise of quantum computing approaches for improving power system resilience, particularly as advancements in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) technology continue to evolve.