Reliability evaluation of power system operations considering time-varying features of components

Abstract

The reliability of power system components can be affected by a numbers of factors such as the health level of components, external environment and operation environment of power systems. These factors also affect the electrical parameters of power system components for example the thermal capacity of a transmission element. The relationship of component reliability and power system is, therefore, a complex nonlinear function related to the above-mentioned factors. Traditional approaches for reliability assessment of power systems do not take the influence of these factors into account. The assessment results could not, therefore, reflect the short-term trend of the system reliability performance considering the influence of the key factors and provide the system dispatchers with enough information to make decent operational decisions. This paper discusses some of these important operational issues from the perspective of power system reliability. The discussions include operational reliability of power systems, reliability influence models for main performance parameters of components, time-varying reliability models of components, and a reliability assessment algorithm for power system operations considering the time-varying characteristic of various parameters. The significance of these discussions and applications of the proposed techniques are illustrated by case study results using the IEEE-RTS.