Prioritization of Transmission Projects using EPRI Probabilistic Risk Assessment Program

EPRI has developed a probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) method under power delivery reliability initiative. Unlike the traditional deterministic contingency analysis, PRA combines a probabilistic measure of the likelihood of undesirable events with a measure of the consequence of the events into a single index. EPRI internally developed the PRA program that uses contingency analysis results as well as the transmission facility outage information as inputs to compute the reliability indices. This paper presents an application of PRA program to prioritize transmission projects for tri-state generation and transmission association. This work has demonstrated that the PRA method can assist system planners in comparing transmission enhancement options and determining the correct construction sequence in order to maximize transmission system reliability and minimize the operational risk.