The power law character of off-site power failures

A study on the behavior of off-site AC power failure recovery times at three nuclear plant sites is presented. It is shown, that power law is appropriate for the representation of failure frequency–duration correlation function of off-site power failure events, based on simple assumptions about component failure and repair rates. It is also found that the annual maxima of power failure duration follow Frechet distribution, which is a type II asymptotic distribution, strengthening our assumption of power law for the parent distribution. The extreme value distributions obtained are used for extrapolation beyond the region of observation.