The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history, repeatedly shattering previous records. The impact of the season was widespread and ruinous with at least 2280 deaths and record damages of over US$128 billion. Of the storms that made landfall, five of the season's seven major hurricanes—Dennis, Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—were responsible for most of the destruction.

Le Xu and Richard E. Brown of Quanta Technology will be presenting "Hurricane Simulation for Florida Utility Damage Assessment" during the Distribution Planning Panel Session on Tuesday, April 22, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.

Since the 2004-2005 hurricane season, interest has increased in assessing the costs and benefits of “system hardening,” such as overhead to underground conversion. To properly assess hardening benefits, a good estimates of hurricane frequency, magnitude, and duration are critical.

The hurricane simulation paper will present a probabilistic model capable of simulating a hurricane year in Florida. This model determines the number of hurricanes in a simulated year; each simulated hurricane is probabilistically assigned landfall information such as landfall location, approach angle, translation velocity, maximum wind speed, and radius of maximum wind.

As the hurricane travels across Florida, the model simulates wind speed decay rate and other features. A Monte Carlo simulation is then used to generate many simulated hurricane years. This allows a probability distribution function of hurricane effects to be calculated for each utility service territory and for proposed hardening project locations. These results can then be used to assess hurricane induced damage both before and after hardening.

Brown will also be chairing the entire Panel Session, which also includes the following presentations:

08TD0651 Potentials for asset optimizations in low and medium
voltage networks through grid oriented feeding of distributed
generation
M. PIELKE, Technical University of
Braunschweig
M. KURRAT, Technical University of
Braunschweig

08TD0685 A Methodology for Electrical Energy Forecast and its Spatial Allocation over Developing Boroughs
R. VASQUEZ-ARNEZ, University of Sao Paulo
R. CASOLARI, University of Sao Paulo

08TD0192 An Analytical Method for Optimum Maintenance of Substations
H. GE, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
S. ASGARPOOR, University of Nebraska-
Lincoln

08TD0053 Capacity Benefit Margin Assessment Based on Multi-area Reliability Exponential Analytic Model
S. RONGFU, State Key Laboratory of Power
Systems, Dept of Electrical Engineering,
Tsinghua University, Beijing
C. LIN, State Key Laboratory of Power
Systems, Dept of Electrical Engineering,
Tsinghua University, Beijing
S. YUANZHANG, State Key Laboratory of
Power Systems, Dept of Electrical Engineering,
Tsinghua University, Beijing
S. YONGHUA, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool
University, Suzhou, 215123, Jiangsu
Province, P.R.China

08TD0557 Multi Objective Distributed Generation Planning in Liberalized
Electricity Markets
A. SOROUDI, Sharif University of Technology
M. EHSAN, Sharif University of Technology