Assessing overhead line's susceptibility to storm wind damage using open data

Wind and storm are one of the leading causes of supply interruptions especially in forested countries. Long and wide scale interruptions can cause large monetary losses and hazards to the society. Thus, decreasing the amount and length of interruptions is a high priority for distribution system operators (DSOs). Security of supply can be improved by cabling or other investments to network infrastructure. However especially in rural areas with a declining popu-lation more cost-effective options should be considered, investments targeted to areas benefitting the most. Having up to date and accurate data of the network environment is key in accomplishing this. DSOs often have only rough classifications of their network environments and they are not frequently updated. However there exists a wealth of open data that is both accurate and updated more regularly, which can be used to more accurately categorise line segments based on their susceptibility to wind and storm damage.This paper focuses on developing a method to accurately classify overhead line section's susceptibility to storm wind damage by combining forest data and DSO interruption data. The categorization results corresponded to ex-pectations and DSO's internal data, however the sample size was fairly small.