A novel statistical-based analysis of WECC bulk transmission reliability data

This paper has presented a new statistical-based approach for analyzing the transmission outage data. The method is applied to the WECC TRD outage data collected by member utilities across Western Interconnection since 2006. The developed model takes into account the random nature of outages and fifteen factors/ variables classified as: categorical, indicator, and explanatory. The main goal of the paper is to evaluate if sufficient operational and maintenance data has been collected to obtain statistically valid results. Concepts associated with the statistical validation of performance indices are discussed with particular emphasis placed on analysis of various types of explanatory variables such as voltage class, length, conductors per phase, number of terminals, circuits per structure, insulator type, structure, terrain and elevation.