Outage prediction using radar measurement for facilitating distribution system restoration

Strong thunderstorms and severe weather events are some of the most significant and frequent threats to the electrical grid infrastructure. Outages resulting from storms can be very costly. While some tools are available to predict storm induced damage, they are typically very crude and provide little forecasting means to facilitate restoration. This study developed a methodology to use historical high-resolution (both temporal and spatial) radar observations of storm characteristics and outage information to develop weather condition dependent failure rate models (FRMs) for different types of generic grid components. Such models can estimate outage numbers in small areas of a utility's service territory once the new weather data becomes available as the input to the models.