Determination of Substation Models for Composite System Reliability Evaluation

The reliability performance of transmission system substations is critical for overall system reliability. Failure events at main grid substations can lead to multiple outages with possible cascading consequences and widespread loss of customer load. Considerable knowledge on substation reliability analysis has been gained from the application of primarily analytical methods. The complexity, however, of substation switching operations does not lend itself to pure analytical treatment. Simulation methods are more suitable as the mathematical modeling of the relationship between events and outcomes is not always possible. The paper expands the existing methodology and describes a method to perform reliability evaluation of substation switching arrangements based on the sequential Monte Carlo simulation. The method is applied in the reliability analysis and comparison of the most commonly used substation switching configurations. The paper shows how the results of the analysis can be applied to model substations in a composite system reliability evaluation.