Failure propagation in Turkish National Power System

Cascading failures are one of the most important problems in electric power systems. Failure propagation mechanism should be studied to minimize the power loss risk. It is a complex problem and acceptable solutions require improved statistical models. Borel-Tanner distribution is one the recent models used for modeling failure propagation phenomena of cascading failures. This study presents Borel-Tanner modelling based cascading outage propagation for the Thrace part of Turkish National Power Transmission System. 7-year transmission system outage data of the region is used to test the model. Average failure propagation rate of cascading phenomena is calculated from the data. The distribution of total number of line outages is then estimated using the calculated failure propagation rate and initial failure distribution. The same total number of line outages is calculated empirically from the network data and the results are compared with of the branching process.