Extreme Weather Risk Framework for Power System Location-based Resilience Assessment

Abstract

Risk assessment methods for electrical power system network based on the historical extreme weather events, also known as High Impact Low Probability events (HILP) helps support system operators to develop and implement effective resilience strategies. To support the power system's resilience, preventive and corrective technologies have been proposed, assessed, and implemented. Additionally, several risk managements tools have been utilized for the system analysis, one being Failure mode and Effects analysis (FMEA) widely used to improve the reliability of the electricity grids by considering different factors to provide the detailed risk assessment. Although FMEA analysis has been reported to help improve the reliability of system it has not been assessed for power system resilience measures. Therefore, this paper attempts to introduce the FMEA to assess and help improve the power system resilience by proposing location-based risk assessment approach to analyze the risk of outages due to the extreme weather events for different locations in North Island major cities of New Zealand. This FMEA based analysis considers the wind gusts data by estimating the severity of the data set with regards to loss of load due to high wind gust, and the probability of failure detection in the selected region. The weather data analysis has been tested and visualized with the actual transmission network data to identify the risk priority number for different locations/zones based in the Waikato region, New Zealand.