Correlation Between Weather Alerts and Grid Component Failures for Grid Alert

Weather events cause most power outages. Often, we even get notifications on our phones to take
cover or be prepared for an imminent event. If electric grid utilities had a similar warning that also included probable
scenarios and the equipment involved, they could prepare and minimize the effects. Idaho National Laboratory
has a project with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response
program to develop a grid alert application that receives messages from the existing emergency alert system, filters
and determines components possibly affected by the emergency event, calculates probable scenarios using
MASTERRI (Modeling And Simulation for Targeted Reliability and Resilience Improvement). An alert link is sent
to electric distribution utility operations staff to allow them to see and evaluate the scenarios and the impact.
Utilities and organizations, such as the international regulatory body North American Electric
Reliability Corporation, have complied historical failure data of elements that comprise the U.S. electric grid.
Nominal failure rates are obtained from this data. To make this tool possible, estimated
failure rates are needed for different component types given the alert type, severity, and location. Historic weatherrelated grid element failures are correlated with historic weather events from the Integrated Public Alert & Warning
System. These correlated events and failures are used along with Bayesian updates from the historical norms to
provide a modified failure rate for grid elements in
the alert areas and calculate probable scenarios. While this paper discusses the Grid Alert project
plan, it primarily focuses on the data gathered and processes used to determine failure rates for possible grid
failure or outage scenarios.