Practical seismic upgrade strategy for substation equipment based on performance indices

This paper presents an upgrade strategy for substation equipment under seismic risk. In Japan, existing old equipment does not often meet the present seismic design standards and the seismic damage is concentrated on such old equipment. This problem is widely recognized as a typical feature of advanced countries. The proposed method helps managerial decisions pertaining to the prioritizing of upgrading the huge number of existing equipment. In order to prioritize the equipment to be upgraded, practitioners have discussed it from various points of view including earthquake resistant capacity of equipment, seismic performance of whole power system and cost effectiveness of equipment upgrading. Thus, the proposed method consists of four different performance indices to quantitatively evaluate these factors. For numerical examples, the proposed method is applied to a hypothetical power system to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed indices.