Alternative sources of power generation interconnected at the transmission level have witnessed an increase in investment in the last few years. On the other hand, when the power systems are being operated close to their limits, power system operators and engineers face the challenge of ensuring a safe and reliable supply of electricity. In such a scenario, the reliability of the transmission system is crucial as it ensures secure transfer of uninterrupted power from the generating sources to the load centers. This thesis is aimed at ensuring the reliability of the transmission system from two perspectives. First, this work monitors power system disturbances such as unintentional islanding to ensure prompt detection and implementation of restorative actions and thus, minimizes the extent of damage. Secondly, it investigates power system disturbances such as transmission line outages through reliability evaluation and outage analysis in order to prevent reoccurrence of similar failures.

In this thesis, a passive Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) based islanding detection scheme called Cumulative Sum of Change in Voltage Phase Angle Difference (CUSPAD) is proposed and tested on a modified 18 bus test system and a modified IEEE 118 bus system with various wind energy penetration levels. Comparative analysis between accuracies of the proposed approach and the conventional relative angle difference approach in presence of measurement errors indicate a superior performance of the former. Results obtained from the proposed approach also reveal that power system disturbances such as unintentional island formations are accurately detected in wind integrated transmission systems.

Quantitative evaluation of the transmission system reliability aids in the assessment of the existing system performance. Further, post-mortem analysis of failures is an important step in minimizing recurrent failures. Reliability evaluation and outage analysis of transmission line outages carried out in this thesis have revealed chronological trends in the system performance. A new index called Outage Impact Index (OII) is also been proposed which can identify and prioritize outages based on their severity. This would serve as a baselining index for assessing and monitoring future transmission system performances and will facilitate implementation of reliability improvement measures if found necessary.