New performance measures for transmission stations

In recent years, many transmission companies have established sets of performance measures for their customer delivery systems. Such measures are used for various purposes such as investment, comparison of performance, etc. When it comes to transmission stations, there are no performance measures in place at the present time that reflect the performance of a station as a whole. In addition, outages to station-related equipment may have different consequences. A station related-outage can affect customers directly in case of a load station or the transfer capability between two locations in the system in case of a transmission station. The asset manager of a transmission system needs to use any available data on asset performance, conditions, utilization and available analysis tools in driving business decisions. He or she may need to know, for example, how stations of different sizes with the same voltage level are compared from the different point of views such as equipment performance, station utilization, station security and personnel safety. He or she may need to identify the worst performing stations (outliers) so that fund may be allocated appropriately. Also, performance measures can help quantify benefits of investments over time. This paper proposes some new quantitative performance measures for transmission and load stations. The proposed measures covers a variety of station related performance aspects such as reliability, utilization, security and safety to personnel. The new measures was used to determine relative station performance, ranking of stations, transmission station component unavailability for the entire transmission network and performance trends. The new performance measures was illustrated by examples.