A Risk-Based Approach to Assess the Operational Resilience of Transmission Grids

Abstract

Modern risk analysis studies of the power system increasingly rely on big datasets, either synthesized, simulated, or real utility data. Particularly in the transmission system, outage events have a strong influence on the reliability, resilience, and security of the overall energy delivery infrastructure. In this paper we analyze historical outage data for transmission system components and discuss the implications of nearby overlapping outages with respect to resilience of the power system. We carry out a risk-based assessment using North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Transmission Availability Data System (TADS) for the North American bulk power system (BPS). We found that the quantification of nearby unscheduled outage clusters would improve the response times for operators to readjust the system and provide better resilience still under the standard definition of N-1 security. Finally, we propose future steps to investigate the relationship between clusters of outages and their electrical proximity, in order to improve operator actions in the operation horizon.

Keywords

• risk analysis
• common mode outages
• grid resilience
• NERC
• sustained and momentary outages
• TADS