Understanding Bulk Power Reliability: The Importance of Good Data and A Critical Review of Existing Sources

Bulk power system reliability is of critical importance to the electricity sector. Complete and accurate information on events affecting the bulk power system is essential for assessing trends and efforts to maintain or improve reliability. Yet, current sources of this information were not designed with these uses in mind. They were designed, instead, to support real-time emergency notification to industry and government first-responders. This paper reviews information currently collected by both industry and government sources for this purpose and assesses factors that might affect their usefulness in supporting the academic literature that has relied upon them to draw conclusions about the reliability of the US electric power system.

The attached report is a pre-print of an article accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the IEEE 45^th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS), January 4-7, 2012, Maui, HI. To view the published version, click here.