Development of a blackout events database for the European electrical power system


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Date

2022-08-30

Publication Type

Other Conference Item

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Rights / License

Abstract

Learning from operational experience can be invaluable in identifying vulnerabilities, procedural deficiencies, and alarming trends in interconnected power systems. Unfortunately, most of this knowledge spreads across transmission system operators (TSOs) and regulatory bodies, and existing databases are often scope-specific, they lack curation and contain limited number of events. To overcome these research gaps, we present a database of safety-relevant blackouts in the European transmission system, which contains over 500 events obtained from publicly available sources, including TSO reports, scientific literature, news articles, and other data collection efforts. Each event is categorized following a set of classification criteria, including: general information of the event, indicators of severity and magnitude, primary causes, contributing factors, sequence of component failures, load conditions, cascade progression, and final states of the system/control zone. Preliminary analyses show that cascading failures are the main failure mechanism behind 32% of all data entries, with weather-related incidents (58%) and equipment failures (24%) being the most prominent causes. Additionally, cascading events contributed to 66% of all demand not served (DNS) and 75% of the total outage duration observed in the database.

Publication status

published

External links

Book title

Book of Extended Abstracts for the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

166 - 167

Publisher

Research Publishing

Event

32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

blackout database; power systems; cascading failures; vulnerability; system recovery

Organisational unit

09452 - Sansavini, Giovanni / Sansavini, Giovanni check_circle

Notes

Conference presentation held on August 30, 2022

Funding

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