Risk assessment of power systems SCADA

SCADA systems are widely used in power systems for monitoring, operation and control purposes. Failure of the SCADA system can result in severe consequences such as customer load losses and equipment damages, etc. Evaluating these consequences at planning stage can help select the appropriate level of reliability of the SCADA systems. This paper presents a practical method for quantifying the risk associated with the failure of the SCADA systems utilized in power systems. The method first identifies the various components of risk and then evaluates each by considering overlap of the two events, failure of control by SCADA and failure of automatic operation of the power system network. The SCADA risk is calculated and expressed in terms of dollars on a station by station basis. The calculated risk can be used to rank a group of stations, to identify the importance of stations and to establish the reliability requirements for the SCADA system that has the lowest capital cost. The proposed method is applied to the Hydro One Transmission Networks System with its historical operating performance data.