The improvement in transmission resilience metrics from reduced outages or faster restoration can be calculated by rerunning historical outage data

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to quantify the benefits of resilience investments in power transmission by rerunning historical outage data with reduced outages or faster restoration, providing tangible metrics for past events.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to evaluate resilience improvements by reprocessing historical outage data, bypassing the need for complex future event modeling.

Findings

Quantifies resilience benefits for past extreme events.

Demonstrates method with case studies of hurricanes and thunderstorms.

Provides stakeholders with tangible evidence of resilience investment impacts.

Abstract

Transmission utilities routinely collect detailed outage data, including resilience events in which outages bunch up due to weather. The resilience events and their resilience metrics can readily be extracted from this historical outage data. Improvements such as grid hardening or investments in restoration lead to reduced outages or faster restoration. We show how to rerun this history with the effects of the reduced outages or faster restoration included to find the resulting improvement in resilience metrics, thus quantifying the benefits of these investments. This is demonstrated with case studies for specific events (a derecho and a hurricane), and all large events or large thunderstorms in the Midwest USA. Instead of predicting future extreme events with models, which is very challenging, the historical rerun readily quantifies the benefits that a resilience investment would have had if it had been made in the past. The historical rerun is particularly vivid in making the case for resilience investments to stakeholders because it quantifies the benefits for events actually experienced by those stakeholders, rather than for future events predicted with uncertainty.