weather considerations in

reliability assessment
 Introduction
• Transmission systems are usually overhead facilities
that operate in a wide range of weather conditions.
• The failure rates of transmission lines are greatly
enhanced in severe weather situations.
• Adverse weather conditions such as gales, lightning,
snow, frost, icing, high wind, etc. can significantly
increase the likelihood of multiple overlapping
outages.
• The coincident failure of multiple circuits during these
periods is generally known as failure bunching.
• Failure bunching in transmission or distribution
systems can significantly impact the reliability
performance
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 Indices to measure reliability
• There are number of reliability indices traditionally
used to quantify reliability performance at different
levels.
• The fundamental load point indices are the average
failure rate, outage duration and annual outage time.
• The most commonly used reliability indices to measure
aggregate electric power utility performance are the
System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI),
the System Average Interruption Duration Index
(SAIDI), the Customer Average Interruption Duration
Index (CAIDI), and the Index of Reliability (IOR)

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Outage causes within transmission
system

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Outage causes within distribution
system

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Weather conditions associated with
outages

Transmission system Distribution system

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 Essential Failure Rate Influential
Factors
Failure rates vary not only with different weather conditions, but
also in time and location along with the movement of storms

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 BASIC WEATHER MODELING
• Electrical transmission networks exist in the two basic
forms of underground facilities using cables and
overhead facilities on appropriate tower structures
• Cables normally operate in a relatively stable
environment, while overhead circuits operate in a wide
range of weather conditions and are subjected to
varying degrees of physical stress due to continuously
changing weather patterns
• The phenomenon of multiple line failures is generally
referred to as failure bunching.
• Parallel redundancy of transmission elements is a
common way of improving the reliability of power
supply
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 Two state weather modelling
• The failure rate of a transmission line is a
continuous function of the weather conditions.
• It is not realistic to attempt to model and collect
data for all possible weather intensity levels.
• IEEE Standard 346 divides the weather
environment into three classes designated as
normal weather, adverse weather and major
storm disaster
• The following describes the consideration of two
weather conditions designated as normal and
adverse weather.
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Chronological weather pattern

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 Average weather profile

N = average duration of normal weather

A = average duration of adverse weather

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Two state weather model

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 Failure rate considerations
• The normal and adverse weather failure rates are expressed
in failures per year of time in the respective weather state,
not in the number of failures per year.
• The average failure rate and the weather specific failure rates
are related as shown in Equation

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 Failure rate considerations
• It is extremely difficult to determine the transmission line
failure rates associated with a particular weather
condition from available historical data.
• However, it can be estimated using following Equations
using the fraction of the total number of failures that can
be attributed to adverse weather (F) and normal weather
(1-F).

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Failure rate representation in the two
state weather model

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Markov analysis of a two component
system
• The Markov approach reflects the stochastic system
behaviour with relatively few assumptions.
• The most relevant assumptions are that the time
duration of each system state is exponentially
distributed, and the transition rates are constant.
• One disadvantage of this approach is that the number
of system states increases significantly as the failure
modes or the number of system components increases
• The system element is represented by the two
operating states designated as up and down.
• When a system model contains a large number of
states, it can be solved using a relatively simple
computer program.
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System state space diagram with a
two state weather model

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 Cond……
• The letters U and D inside the rectangles in denote the
component currently being in the up-state (operating)
and down-state (failed) respectively.
• The parameters an and na are the transition rates
between normal and adverse weather.
• The repair activity is assumed to be carried out only in
normal weather.
• The repair rate in the adverse weather state is
therefore zero.
• The steady state probabilities can be determined using
the frequency balance approach as follows
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 Cond…..

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 Cond……
Previous Equations are system of dependent simultaneous
equations and therefore, to solve for the eight variables, an
additional independent equation is needed.
This additional equation is

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 Cond….

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 Cond…..

The stochastic transitional probability matrix possesses a feature

that can be employed in order to obtain matrix [X].
The stochastic transitional probability matrix constructed using
the state space diagram shown in Figure is as follows.

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 Cond….

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 Cond….
• The matrix [X] can be produced by subtracting the
transpose of [P] from the identity matrix.
• [X ] = [I ]- Transpose of [P ]
• The system failure rate can be obtained using the
stochastic transitional probability matrix
• The system states 4 and 8 represent the down state
for the two component parallel redundant system.
• If the rows and columns corresponding to the
system down states are removed, the resulting
matrix is [Q] as given below.
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 Cond…

The truncated matrix [Q] is subtracted from the identity matrix

and inverted it gives the resulting matrix [N].

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 Cond…..
• State 1 is considered to be the starting state.
• The total expected time before entering the
absorbing state is the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF)
and is obtained by summing the first row of the
matrix [N]

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 Cond…..
• The average system outage duration rw is the average time
spent in the down state and is obtained by dividing the
cumulative probability of the failed state by the frequency of
encountering the failed state.

• The average system unavailability Uw is the probability of the

system being in the down state.
• Following Eqn gives the unavailability for the two
component parallel redundant system.

The average system unavailability is usually expressed in hours per year by

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multiplying Uw by 8760 hours per year.
State space diagram for a three component
system with a two state weather model

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State space diagram for a two component
system with a three state weather model

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