Incorporating maintenance outage effects in substation and switching station reliability studies

This paper illustrates a procedure to incorporate maintenance outages in substation and switching station reliability evaluation. Markov models of the station components and their application in creating mathematical models of station maintenance failure modes are presented. The method is illustrated by application to a switching station. The single station analysis is extended by application to all the stations in a composite generation and transmission system using a small test system. System sensitivity analysis is illustrated by varying selected station component parameters. The results show the implications of including maintenance outage considerations in the overall analysis of a composite system. The approach presented in this paper can provide valuable information for decision-making in power system planning, design and operation.