Estimating performance and risk in electric power systems

This paper describes a formal method to assess the performance and risk related to electric power systems. A model of disturbance propagation is proposed to avail their impact on the expected levels of performance indicators and risk of Power Systems, and the contribution and cross impact from several market agents and actors during outages in the electric grid. The method is based on cascade disturbance propagation through the topology of the electric grid. Besides intrinsic forced and programmed outage rates of equipment, protection reliability and dependability, hidden and breaker failures, and time to manual or automatic reclosing are also modeled. Their joint contribution determines the final continuity level of each grid node, and the fraction of responsibility of each agent. With minor changes, the method can be applied to other process industries. The model is implemented in a MatLab^® program, and a real case study is shown for the risk assessment of a large transmission station in Brazil.