The impact of high-voltage circuit breaker condition on power system
reliability indices
Abstract
Condition monitoring data can be used to assess the health of a power
system component but is rarely used to assess the reliability of the
power system they are part of. For high-voltage circuit breakers
(HVCBs), the susceptibility to various failures can be assessed by
examining trip coil current (TCC) measurements. HVCBs have two failure
modes, failure to trip on command and tripping without a command, which
are triggered by various failure mechanisms that in turn may depend on
the technical condition of the HVCBs. The aim of this paper is to
demonstrate a methodology for quantifying the impact that the technical
condition of HVCBs has on the power system reliability indices. An
equivalent transmission line failure rate considering protection system
failures, including failures related to HVCBs, can be calculated by
computing contributions from various fault types (FTs). This paper
proposes a framework that can quantify the frequency of the FTs that are
affected by HVCB condition. The system-level effects are then evaluated
using approximate methods for power system reliability evaluation. To
demonstrate the principles and benefits of this methodology, a case
study is presented that incorporates HVCB condition data from the
Icelandic transmission grid into an illustrative 4-bus test system; a
dataset of 83 TCC measurements from 38 HVCBs from the Icelandic
Transmission System Operator is used, together with an outage database
of life histories of 464 HVCBs from the Icelandic transmission grid.
Results indicate that the condition deterioration associated with the
probability of an HVCB failing to trip on command can significantly
degrade the reliability indices.