multiple outages

[pj598]

How do you model multiple outages with the API? I have a historical account of when the location I want to model a microgrid for experienced outages (start time and end times). Would it be "outage_start_time_steps" and "outage_duartions" under "ElectricUtility"? What does "outage_probabilities" do? Thanks for your help!

[kurt-verdant]

If you can make the simplifying assumption that all the outages are the same length (e.g., 48 hours each), I think you could do this:

"ElectricUtility":{
"outage_durations":[48],
"outage_start_time_steps":[8681,2440,4384,6473]
}

The Web Tool is set up to accept four "outage_start_time_steps" values, but I just ran the API with eight and it seemed to work so presumably you could enter as many experienced outages as you want.

NOTE: The remainder of this message describes experiments that did NOT produce answers to your questions.

Using different "outage_durations" values (e.g., [48, 36, 24, 12]) for the original four "outage_start_time_steps" values shown above seemed to NOT work.

The help text for "outage_probabilities" is:

"One-to-one with outage_durations. The probability of each duration of the grid outage. Defaults to equal probability for each duration. This input is used for robust optimization across multiple outages. The maximum (over outage_start_time_steps) of the expected value (over outage_durations with probabilities outage_probabilities) of outage cost is included in the objective function minimized by REopt."

I'm new to REopt so I'd probably need to see a numerical example to understand that definition completely.

When I tried this:

"ElectricUtility":{
"outage_durations":[8,14],
"outage_probabilities":[0.75,0.25],
"outage_start_time_steps":[8681,2440]
}

It produced outage series of length 56. I don't know how one would interpret those 56 values with respect to the complete 8760. One interesting thing about the number 56 is that it is four times 14 (which is one of the "outage_durations" values). But I don't know why exactly. The structure of the outage series is also interesting. As just one example, the structure of ["Outages"]["storage_discharge_series_kw"] is shown in the attached pictures. It's a 2x2 matrix, composed of two unique series, each of which appears twice. Perhaps someone can provide some insight as to why that is exactly.