Aggregated vulnerability assessment of power transmission lines under operational and hurricane induced outages

Power transmission lines are at risk during extreme weather events and their outage can be disastrous for the power grid operation. Extreme weather event forecasting is not always precise, making it difficult to predict transmission line failures and the resultant consequences. These potential contingencies demand careful examination in power system planning. Conventionally, contingency ranking using operational performance indexes (PIs) based on line flows and voltage violations has been adopted. For a further in-depth reliability evaluation, weather-based uncertainties should be considered in conjunction with performance-based metrics. In this paper, a hurricane is considered as an extreme weather event. Multiple possible paths and intensities of the hurricane are simulated for the line wear-out stage to calculate a weather-based failure rate index (FRI). FRI states how much a particular line is affected by the hurricane and which line requires immediate attention. Finally, transmission line vulnerability rankings are generated through the unification of line operational performance and weather-based parameters. A fuzzy inference system calculates an aggregated vulnerability index based on the PI and FRI of the lines. The proposed model and techniques have been tested on IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 30-bus systems. •Line vulnerability rankings considering operational and weather-based parameters.•A novel FIS-based vulnerability index adaptable to system operator requirements.•Hurricane paths, intensities, line aging and physical factors in the outage analysis.