Predicting Lightning-Related Outages in Power Distribution Systems: A Statistical Approach

This paper presents a novel data-driven approach for predicting lightning-related outages that occur in power distribution systems on a daily basis. In order to develop an approach that is able to successfully fulfill this objective, there are two main challenges that ought to be addressed. The first challenge is to define the extent of the target area. An unsupervised machine learning approach is proposed to overcome this difficulty. The second challenge is to adequately identify characteristics of lightning-related outages and to explore the relationship between these outages and weather-related variables (thunderstorm events). In this paper, these outages are clustered into a few manageable groups. Then, a probabilistic model is presented to estimate the likelihood of each group of outages. Finally, a machine learning classification algorithm that can handle the imbalanced problem is developed to predict what group will the outage belong to on a specific day in a specific area of the system under study. Actual outage data, obtained from a major utility in the U.S., in addition to radar weather forecast data are utilized to build the proposed approach. Also, three case studies are provided to show several issues associated with predicting lightning-related outages, and to demonstrate how the proposed approach can address those problems adequately.