COMMON-CAUSE OUTAGES IN MULTIPLE CIRCUIT TRANSMISSION-LINES

Reliability evaluation of a power system involving both generation and transmission elements is extremely complex. Outages of these elements are usually considered to be s-independent events. Recent investigations, however, have indicated that common-cause outages of multicircuit transmission configurations can appreciably affect the predicted reliability. Closed form expressions for steady state probabilities in 2- and 3-line cases (including certain common-cause failures) are developed. These expressions provide transmission-line state probabilities for composite generation and transmission system reliability studies. The procedure can also be used to develop state probabilities for other line models and for systems with four or more lines on the same right-of-way. The examples show the influence of the common-cause outage rate on the state probabilities. There is a definite need to include common-cause outages in reliability evaluation of transmission systems. This will require a more comprehensive approach to collecting transmission line outage data than has previously been used by most utilities.