Recovery Time Metric Demonstrated on Real-world Electric Grid for Hurricane Impacted Outages

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general methodology for estimating recovery times of power system components after hurricanes, demonstrated on Puerto Rico's grid with results highlighting the impact of different failure modes.

Contribution

It presents a novel, adaptable framework for estimating recovery times applicable to various system components and disaster scenarios, validated on real-world hurricane data.

Findings

Transmission towers significantly influence recovery times.

Average recovery time across scenarios is approximately 28,000 work crew days.

Transmission towers have a greater impact on recovery duration than substations.

Abstract

This work proposes a methodology for estimating recovery times for transmission lines and substations, and is demonstrated on a real-world 1269-bus power system model of Puerto Rico under 20 hurricane scenarios, or stochastic realizations of asset failure under the meteorological conditions of Hurricane Maria. The method defines base recovery times for system components and identifies factors that impact these base values by means of multipliers. While the method is tested on transmission lines and substation failures due to hurricanes, it is based on a generic process that could be applied to any system component or event as a general recovery time estimation framework. The results show that given the two failure modes under study (transmission towers and substations), transmission towers appear to have a greater impact on recovery time estimates despite substations being given longer base outage times. Additionally, average recovery times for the simulated hurricanes across 20 scenarios is ~28,000 work crew days.