Analysis of Weather and Climate Extremes Impact on Power System Outage

This paper proposes statistical analyses of realworld power system outages to advance our knowledge regarding the power system outages and weather extremes characteristics and their linkages. 20-year historical power system outage data from the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) are gathered with a focus on each outage transmission line, together with co-located weather attributes and recorded extreme weather events in the service area, which are paired in comparable spatial and temporal scales. Statistical frequency analysis and cross-tabular evaluation are performed to investigate the occurring frequency and duration of outages associated with extreme weather in the study area. The study reveals that the weather-related outages can be mainly attributed to hail and thunderstorm events which correspond to up to 60% out of all failures in several transmission line types. The transmission line outages caused by the top two weather extremes have been classified by KOPPEN climate system to reveal the outage patterns under geographic features impacts, which provide the guidance on stochastic planning and risk assessment in a larger scale with various weather and climate scenarios.