Multiple Outage Challenges to Transmission Grid Resilience

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to provide insights on the quantification of power systems' resilience using historical outage data for transmission system components. Assessing the impact of outage events on reliability, security, and resilience in planning and operations is a key requirement of today's power grid. Today's transmission grid is operated under additional stress due to growing demand, market requirements, and high penetrations of intermittent renewable energy resources. In this paper, we discuss multiple challenges to the grid resilience under nearby overlapping outages. This type of outage is a threat to operating a system under the common N-1 contingency. The impact of these outages on the grid resilience was assessed by a developed assessment technique. The assessment technique is executed using North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Transmission Availability Data System (TADS) for North American Bulk Power System (BPS). The results of the analysis demonstrate how, by using inventory and outage data in TADS, it is possible to effectively quantify system resilience to nearby overlapping outages in the operation horizon. In addition, this paper describes and classifies clusters of overlapping outages that impact the power grid resilience. Finally, we propose a research path for tackling the resilience challenge in the operation horizon.