Ian of Iowa State University

Power system reliability addresses the frequent small outages of power systems, and power system resilience addresses the rarer and high impact large blackout events that are usually caused by extreme weather. The standard SAIDI metric based on customer minutes interrupted works well for tracking distribution power system reliability, as long as the largest events (the major event days) are excluded. When we try to measure resilience by tracking the customer minutes interrupted in large events, the data varies erratically since the large events vary so much in size, and the usual statistics do not work. This is the phenomenon of "heavy tails" in extreme events. A simple solution is to logarithmically transform the data to obtain the new resilience metric SALEDI, which stands for System Average Large Event Duration Index. SALEDI can track power system resilience from standard utility outage data, can be broken down by event cause, and responds to both the frequency and average log size of large events. We discuss how SALEDI and related metrics could be used to monitor, improve, and optimize resilience. This is joint work with Dr. Arslan Ahmad, now at Dominion Energy.

Biography:

Prof. Ian Dobson was educated at Cambridge University (BA Math) and Cornell University (PhD Electrical Engineering). He previously worked as a systems analyst in British industry and as faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently Sandbulte professor in electrical engineering at Iowa State University. Ian is a Life Fellow of the IEEE. Ian has worked on voltage collapse blackouts and other applications of nonlinear dynamics. He is currently interested in data analytics, complex systems, and power system blackouts, and is developing resilience metrics and a probabilistic risk analysis for power systems stressed by extreme weather and cascading failure. Details and publications are available at http://iandobson.ece.iastate.edu.

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