A NOVEL METHOD FOR INCORPORATING WEATHER EFFECTS IN COMPOSITE SYSTEM ADEQUACY EVALUATION

This paper presents a novel method of incorporating weather effects in composite system adequacy evaluation. The proposed method can recognize regional weather aspects including those situations in which transmission lines traverse several geographical regions which undergo different weather conditions. The method illustrated in this paper uses a Monte Carlo approach which can be readily applied to large scale transmission systems. Case studies conducted using a program developed at the University of Saskatchewan show that neglecting all consideration of weather effects can lead to an optimistic assessment of system adequacy while ignoring regional weather conditions can overestimate the resulting failure bunching effects due to adverse weather. Weather variations create larger effects in annual indices than in annualized indices and can have different effects on the indices at different load buses. The effects of adverse weather on composite system inadequacy indices increase considerably as the proportion of failures in adverse weather increases. It is therefore important to establish suitable and practical procedures for collecting adverse weather data which can be utilized in realistic composite system adequacy assessment. The modelling procedure proposed in this paper also provides a realistic framework for practical data collection.