Statistical analysis of frequency and duration of forced outages for subtransmission circuit breakers

Abstract : Outages on the power system may affect the economy and jeopardise critical services such as transport, communication, emergency, and security services. Breaker failures, in particular, tend to result in serious injuries, death, affected customers, poor network performance statistics, negative regulatory perceptions, loss of revenue, and equipment replacement costs. The most relevant work published in the current literature on analysis of populations of breaker statistical analysis is limited to air blast breakers operating at 115kV, 230kV, and 500kV. The most relevant knowledge on the statistical analysis of unplanned sub transmission outages is restricted to only transformer outages. The analysis of outage datarestoration time focuses on all the events on the broad distribution system. Based on the literature review conducted, the statistical analysis of data for populations of substation equipment remains an under-studied area of research. More specifically, none of the current literature focuses on sub-transmission breaker outage frequency and outage restoration time. This study focused on the statistical analysis of sub-transmission breaker forced outage frequency and forced outage restoration times. In the case of circuit breaker outage frequencies, the following was done: • The various variables of breaker unplanned outage frequencies were analysed by using breaker unplanned actual number of outages and outage rates. • The dependence between variables was explored by using two-dimensional charts. • The significance of the observed dependence between variables was then quantified using a chi-squared test. In the case of outage restoration times, the following was done:..M.Phil. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering