Revista Científica de Ingeniería Energética (Jan 2019)
The application of Probabilistic Safety Assessment to Electric Transmission Systems
Abstract
Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) has been widely used in Nuclear Power Plants Risk Analysis and can be applied to Electric Power Systems to evaluate initiating events such as short circuits, transmission lines overflows or human operational / maintenance errors that could lead to catastrophic damages, including cascading failures and blackouts. The present paper is dedicated to a PSA application, showing how a combined Event Tree / Fault Tree model can perform a probabilistic evaluation of the risk derived from the failure to isolate a short circuit in a transmission line. The model quantification allowed identifying the most critical elements (circuit breakers, DC power systems and communication system devices) and selecting proper improvement measures leading to an 88% risk reduction. The quantification process was performed applying the EXCEL software version of the Advanced Combinatorial Method for solving complex fault trees (CSolv+).
