Application of an adequacy equivalent method in bulk power system reliability evaluation

A major difficulty in adequacy evaluation of composite generation and transmission or bulk power systems is the computation time required when the power system is large and high outage levels are investigated. A technique for studying the adequacy performance of a selected area (area of interest) in a power network in which the remaining network is modeled as an adequacy equivalent is presented in this paper. This approach can be useful in large power networks, where it is necessary to perform detailed adequacy evaluation of selected specific areas in the overall network. The equivalent approach can also be used to investigate the effects of high level outages, which may not be possible when the entire composite power network is considered. The basic concepts are illustrated using a simple radial power system. Applications and advantages of the proposed method are illustrated by presenting system study results for the IEEE two area Reliability Test System.