An enhanced probabilistic contingency analysis for development of risk-informed transmission planning

The electric power industry heavily relies on software tools for planning and operation. Some of these tools are widely adopted by utilities. It is foreseen that the industry will continue to use these tools until the next generation of grid analytical tools becomes available and mature. These tools, however, were usually designed to perform deterministic studies or limited probabilistic analyses. Regulators and other industry stakeholders recognize the need of having tools to better account for the increasing uncertainties and provide probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) based decision-making procedures. To address these issues, this study offers a short-term solution by enhancing the PRA capabilities of these popular tools by developing interfaces for the existing tools. These interfaces will handle the statistical distributions of the different input parameters and extract the risk measures and metrics for decision-makers. A widely used transmission planning tool, PSS/E, is selected for demonstration of this solution.