Comparison of risk-based and deterministic security assessments

The traditional N-1 security criterion provides only a limited perspective on the actual level of security of a power system and a risk-based approach to security assessment provides considerably more information on which to base operating decisions. It further argues that this risk should be measured in terms of expected outage costs to the consumers. Furthermore, the risk calculation should not be limited to the consideration of a predefined set of contingencies but should factor in the actual probabilities of outages leading to load disconnections. A case study based on the IEEE-Reliability Test System shows that different operating points on the system's deterministic security boundary have very different levels of risk. For a given operating point, the risk level changes considerably between fair, average and bad weather conditions. Finally, the paper shows how, using adaptive deterministic security boundaries, it is possible to compare the cost and benefit of relaxing operating limits. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2007.