The Effect of Power Outages and Cheap Talk on Willingness to Pay to Reduce Outages Using an open-ended contingent valuation survey, we analyze how (i) experience of a power outage due to one of the worst storms ever to hit Sweden and (ii) a cheap talk script affect respondents’ WTP to avoid power outages. Experience significantly increases and a cheap talk script decreases the proportion of res...

Reports of various committees set up to review the 2003 North American major power outages pointed out that a major exacerbating factor has been lack of situational awareness by power system operators. To improve reactive power compensation and contribute to the mitigation of power outages associated with the present near-limit operated commercialized grid, a bus voltage stability (BVS) index b...

In this paper we describe a novel approach to detecting power outages that utilizes social media platform users as “social sensors” for virtual detection of power outages. We present the underlying methodology based on analyzing Twitter and other social media data that detects bursts in tweets related to the power outages. The proposed methodology was implemented and deployed by a major company...

Fragility curves depict the relationship between a weather variable (wind speed, gust speed, ice accumulation, precipitation rate) and the observed outages for a targeted infrastructure network. This paper describes an empirical study of the county by county distribution of power outages and one minute weather variables during Hurricane Irene with the objective of comparing 1) ‘as built’ fragil...

This paper proposes a novel approach for coherent generators online clustering in a large power system following a wide area disturbance. An interconnected power system may become unstable due to severe contingency when it is operated close to the stability boundaries. Hence, the bulk power system controlled islanding is the last resort to prevent catastrophic cascading outages and wide area bl...

Current differential based wide area protection (WAP) has recently been proposed as a technique to increase the reliability of protection systems. It increases system stability and can prevent large contingencies such as cascading outages and blackouts. This paper describes how power differential protection (PDP) can be used within a WAP and shows that the algorithm operates correctly for a...

Streetlights are necessary for an urban area. However, there is no an effective monitoring system to maintain their functions for normal operating. Power outages occur frequently in the mountain area whenever a typhoon or earthquake strikes. For the purpose of energy saving, emergency lighting and monitoring, we proposes an LED-light monitoring system, which combines an MSP430 microcontroller, ...

Power outages (PO) constitute a serious problem around the world that disrupts our lives in the most unexpected ways. There were 3, 634 power outages reported in 2014, affecting 14.2 million people [3], and over the period of 2008-2014 the US has averaged 2, 987 outages affecting 21.6 million people per year, leading to estimated losses in excess of $150 billion annually [3]. To address this pr...

Reliability investigation has always been one of the most important issues in power systems planning. The outages rate in power system reflects the fact that more attentions should be paid on reliability indices to supply consumers with uninterrupted power. Using reliability indices in economic dispatch problem may lead to the system load demand with high reliability and low probability of powe...