Proceedings of the
The 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023)
3 – 8 September 2023, Southampton, UK
Reliability Analysis of European Power System Assets
Reliability and Risk Engineering Laboratory, Institute of Energy and Process Engineering, Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
ABSTRACT
Large interconnected systems can be severely destabilized due to failures of interconnector lines and large generating units. Therefore, identifying the failure behavior of critical assets can be invaluable for modeling and research purposes. In this work, we analyze outages of European generation and transmission system assets, obtained from the ENTSO-E transparency platform. We analyze the data using Markov chain and analytical methods. Our results show that the reliability of generating units is primarily impacted by the technology type and country of origin. Nuclear and fossil units have the lowest availability, resulting from their high unavailability due to planned and forced outages, respectively. Furthermore, we observe that units with high frequency of planned transitions, tend to have a low frequency of forced transitions, and vice versa. This emphasizes the positive impact of preventive maintenance measures in ensuring the safe and reliable operation of generating units. Regarding transmission system assets, we find that AC interconnectors are substantially more reliable than DC interconnectors. Additionally, we observe that internal lines, transformers, and substations are more available compared to interconnector lines. The results obtained from this work can provide important insights for the operation of European assets, helping system operators and researchers identify key vulnerabilities.
Keywords: European power system, Transmission assets, Generating units, Availability, Transition rates.
