A circuit breaker reliability model for restoration planning considering risk of communication outage

A large scale blackout is a long term loss of electricity over a large geographical area. In order to succeed with the restoration, the electric utility SCADA system must be highly reliable not only in normal operation but also during a black out. The main contribution of this paper is a circuit breaker (CB) reliability model to be used in restoration planning. The model consider both the reliability of a SCADA system and the reliability of a communication system during a power outage. If a remote control of CB fails, due to battery undersizing, it is assumed in the paper that a manual operation of CB can be performed if field personal can communicate with the TSO head-quarter. The evaluation of the reliability to operate CB is performed by solving the so called s-t reliability problem for a graph with failure prone components. The method is applied in a case study where the SCADA architecture for an IEEE reliability test system is modeled.