Modular modeling and risk assessment of power transmission lines under extreme weather hazards

Power transmission lines are the “highways” of electricity, consisting of conductors supported on steel towers. Transmission towers are categorized as support or angle/dead-end based on their capability to resist along-line loads transmitted by the conductors. They are vulnerable to severe weather and in particular the combination of high winds and ice accretion that could lead to catastrophic failures. It is thus of great interest in the system design to arrest the propagation of a single tower failure that may trigger a series of failures of adjacent ones, considerably lengthening the duration of power outage. A modular multi-span model of a power line is proposed for the assessment of the behavior of the towerline system and the severity evaluation of such failures. Fault tree analysis is employed to examine the failure propagation to adjacent towers under extreme weather hazard, which allows the assessment of consequences at the level of an entire system of interleaved support and angle/dead-end transmission towers. The aggregated economic losses for an operational lifetime of 60 years are investigated using the proposed model versus a simplified approach, where all towers are exclusively characterized as support ones without considering successive failures.