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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3203-8356

Date Available

6-25-2027

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Engineering

Department/School/Program

Mining Engineering

Faculty

John G. Groppo Jr.

Faculty

Steven J. Schafrik

Abstract

Conventional electric power system planning and analysis frameworks face emergent challenges from, among other things, accelerated legacy fossil-fuel-fired capacity retirements, proliferation of intermittent energy resources and natural gas-fired baseload capacity, rapid load growth, and extreme weather events. In 2024, Kentucky's Energy Planning and Inventory Commission (EPIC) was introduced as a nationally unique institutional response to many of these challenges, requiring a comprehensive evaluation of the Commonwealth's electrical energy supply ecosystem – from the primary energy (fuel) point of origin to the ratepayer electricity meter. This comprehensive statutory mandate, alongside other federal regulatory and academic motivators, has delivered an impetus for and the rough scope of a novel electricity ecosystem analytical architecture, one translatable to myriad regions, nationally. Integral to this impetus, these motivators reveal a fundamental analytical gap inherent to conventional utility planning and analysis frameworks; means, methods, and metrics for evaluating electric power system's primary energy supply (PES), especially within fossil-heavy systems, are generally absent. Further to this point, high impact, low probability (HILP) fault events within the PES of the grid are an increasingly relevant source of bulk power system (BPS) adequacy failure, as demonstrated by the events of Winter Storms Uri (2021) and Elliott (2022). Conventional BPS-focused resource adequacy and related reliability modeling frameworks are, given their probabilistic architectures, ill-equipped to anticipate these events, and ill-suited to predict their impacts (HILP-type PES disruptions occur on the extreme tails of probability distributions). Further, a ‘go-to’ purpose-built PES-centric modeling architecture that is widely commercially or otherwise available and implementable for state-jurisdiction-scale (multi-utility territory) PES-informed electric power system resilience assessment is not readily at hand. This body of work explores the development of an integrated analytical and policy framework considerate of these electric power system dimensions, introducing the PES Digital Twin Chaos Engineering (PES-DTCE) analytic framework to address such PES-specific gaps. PES-DTCE integrates digital twin (DT) and chaos engineering (CE) methods and principles into a deterministic predictive model capable of characterizing PES and BPS interaction and interdependent performance. This effort further demonstrates the implementation of the PES-DTCE framework via a case study centered on the Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities (LKE) System across a 20-month period spanning December 2021 through July 2023. As a means of validating the architecture’s predictive performance, a chaos experiment is designed around the events of Winter Storm Elliott (specifically the window of December 23rd through December 26th, 2022), during which a freeze-off event on the Texas Gas Transmission natural gas pipeline system disrupted fuel delivery to LKE generating stations. This disruption resulted in unit capacity derates which contributed to a period of load curtailment on the LKE System. This dissertation delivers a structured characterization of Kentucky’s largest electric power system PES topology, identifying primary energy flow constraints and notable infrastructure interdependencies, and yields results which demonstrate the ability of PES-DTCE to produce predictive outputs that agree with the empirical record. Beyond validation, this effort produces predictive performance estimates for the LKE system, assuming variations on installed generating capacity technology, primary energy resource, and PES network topology. Ultimately, results are derived which demonstrate the utility of PES-DTCE as a policy-informing framework cognizant of the role of the PES in energy system reliability, resilience, and related attributes of performance.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.328

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Available for download on Friday, June 25, 2027

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