A Data Preparation Pipeline for the Analysis of the Italian Power Grid Reliability

Power grids play a fundamental role in modern society, providing the energy that sustains all daily operations. Given their critical importance, understanding and analyzing outages in these systems is essential to guarantee consistent and reliable energy delivery. While the Italian transmission system operator publishes outage data and information on user sites connected to the grid, they are often provided in formats that can complicate access. Additionally, the structure of the tables frequently changes over the years, making integration a challenging task. To address this, we developed a data pipeline to acquire, prepare, and integrate these data into a unified relational database, with the ultimate goal of facilitating reliability analyses for the Italian energy network. In this work, we focused on designing the database, particularly its conceptual and logical schema, and integrating all power grid data while maintaining high data quality throughout the pipeline. Finally, we conducted a failure trend analysis, using the extensive data from our final database, to evaluate how the reliability of the grid has changed over time. From this analysis, we observed that the number of outages and their duration has increased over the years, exhibiting an overall upward trend.