Obtaining statistics of cascading line outages spreading in an electric transmission network from standard utility data

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to derive network topology and outage spread statistics from standard utility data, aiding understanding and modeling of cascading failures in power transmission networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to extract network topology and outage propagation statistics directly from utility outage data, facilitating better analysis of cascading failures.

Findings

Network topology can be reconstructed from outage data.

Statistics of outage spreading patterns are obtained.

Method enables validation of cascading failure models.

Abstract

We show how to use standard transmission line outage historical data to obtain the network topology in such a way that cascades of line outages can be easily located on the network. Then we obtain statistics quantifying how cascading outages typically spread on the network. Processing real outage data is fundamental for understanding cascading and for evaluating the validity of the many different models and simulations that have been proposed for cascading in power networks.