For reasonable power quality assessment of transient disturbances in electric power systems, new transient power quality indices are developed based on a signal processing technique, time-frequency analysis. Based on the time-frequency distribution of a transient disturbance, a set of time-frequency based power quality indices are developed. In this paper, the instantaneous disturbance energy ratio, normalized instantaneous disturbance energy ratio, instantaneous frequency, and instantaneous K-factor are suggested for transient power quality assessment. Time-frequency based power quality indices allow one to quantify the effects of transient disturbances with high-resolution and accuracy.