Transmission System Critical Component Identification Considering Full Substations Configuration and Protection Systems

Electricity companies have been under a great pressure to improve their technical and financial performances in order to survive and thrive in the deregulated environment. Therefore, these companies are seeking for innovative approaches to take the most out of the restricted resources. These approaches inherently concentrate the available budgets to the most critical components. In this regard, prioritizing the system components and identifying the most critical ones play a vital role in the planning and operation of the system. This paper presents a novel approach to prioritize power transmission system components. In the proposed methodology, a criticality factor is defined and implemented to rank the components based on their impacts on the operation of the power system. Furthermore, a complete model of substations including misoperation of circuit breakers and protection systems is, for the first time, taken into account in the critical component identification process. The proposed approach is used to identify the vulnerable parts of the system and assist the decision makers to manage the limited resources. The proposed methodology is, then, applied to the IEEE 24-bus Reliability Test System, and components are prioritized accordingly.