Spatial-Temporal Reliability and Damage Assessment of Transmission Networks under Hurricanes

Hurricanes can damage transmission network structure components, e.g., towers and conductors, and threat the system reliability. To quantify the consequence severity of hurricanes on transmission networks, a spatial-temporal reliability and damage assessment method is proposed to evaluate the effect of a specific hurricane. The hurricane can be a simulated, historical, or forecasting one for different application purpose, where the full track hurricane simulation model, historical records, and forecasting information are used for the event construction, respectively. In the component failure analysis, the time-varying failure probability of transmission towers and conductors are modeled as functions of the time-varying hurricane intensity. In the reliability and damage assessment, the Monte Carlo simulation is adopted. The energy not supplied and power outage cost caused by the hurricane event are used as reliability indices, and the asset damage cost is proposed to quantify the damage of transmission networks. The modified IEEE 24-reliability test system and the two-area IEEE reliability test system-1996 affected by a simulated hurricane, respectively, are used in the case study to validate the proposed method. The simulation results show the method can quantify the hurricane impacts, identify the weak network parts, and provide information for pre-event preparedness for forecasting event application.