Component criticality importance measures for the power industry

New reliability importance measures have been developed for the power industry to be applied for Electricity Transmission Systems (ETS). Reliability criticality measures are useful metrics to rank components regarding their impact on system performance. Criticality measures serve as useful tools to prioritize reliability improvement activities, identify weak-links in the system and many other uses. These proposed measures pertain to the outage rate of the system and component instead of the probability of failure or survival for a defined mission time. Outage rate is the best suited and appropriate output variable to evaluate the importance of the components in the electricity distribution system. The ETS is the component of the bulk transmission system to provide electricity to large municipalities, large industrial customers and the retail distribution system. The ETS is composed mainly of components such as lines, transformers, breakers and buses. All these components are interconnected with the aim of transporting electrical energy from the bulk transmission system to various load points. The new criticality measures are demonstrated on some commonly used electrical configurations, such as, breaker-and-a-half, breaker-and-a-third and the Dual Element Spot Network (DESN) for ETS.