Identifying Critical Components for Transmission System Reliability

This paper presents a method to quantify and rank transmission system components by their importance for system reliability under different load scenarios. Each component is ranked by three separate importance indexes based on its expected outage rate and impact on: 1) system security margin; 2) load supply; and 3) generation units. By studying these three interests individually, a more complete view of the risks to system reliability can be assessed. The method is demonstrated on a detailed power system model (7000 components) of a significant part of the Great Britain transmission system at 400 and 275 kV. The results show how sensitive the component indexes are to the load scenario. The method provides an input for decision-making when planning maintenance and new investment and can be used as a complement to deterministic criteria.