Characterization of power system outages caused by hurricanes through localized intensity indices

This paper discusses characterization of hurricane-caused power system outages using simple to calculate localized tropical cyclone intensity indices. Studied outage metrics include maximum outage incidence, average outage duration, and restoration time for 95% and 98% of the maximum outages. Four hurricane damaging actions are considered: storm surge, maximum sustained wind-speeds, the exposure time to at least tropical storm winds, and the land area swept by the hurricane. For an optimal curve fitting process that derives intensity indices for each of the outage metrics, the study follows an empirical approach by using outage and four actions data for hurricanes from 2004-08. The maximum outage incidence is observed to follow a logistic curve with a correlation of 0.8, suggesting a good fit. Restoration times fit a cubic polynomial with an R2 of 0.65 because of the influence of different management approaches and logistical processes during restoration.