This book looks at why historical deterministic practices and standards, mostly developed in the 1950’s, should be reviewed in order to take full advantage of new emerging technologies and facilitate transition to a smart grid paradigm. It also demonstrates that a probabilistic approach to developing future efficient operating and design strategies enabled by new technologies, will appropriately balance network investment against non-network solutions while truly recognizing the effects of adverse weather, common mode failures, high impact low probability events, changing market prices for pre and post-contingency actions, equipment malfunctioning, etc.

This clearly requires explicit consideration of the likelihood of various outages (beyond those considered in deterministic studies) and quantification of their impacts on alternative network operation and investment decisions, which cannot be undertaken in a deterministic, “one size fits all” framework.

Through various case studies conducted on the Great Britain (GB) power network, this monograph sets out the key questions that need to be addressed in support of change in the network reliability paradigm. It provides an overview of the key modelling approaches proposed for assessing the risk profile of operation of future networks, proposes a framework for a fundamental review of the existing network security standards, and sets out challenges for assessing the reliability and economics of the operation of future electricity networks"".