RELIABILITY WORTH ASSESSMENT FOR DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS: AUTOMATED VS. TRADITIONAL CONFIGURATIONS

摘要

The influence of the electricity market on electrical distribution development determines new technical and legislative factors that limit the profitability of distribution companies. One of the main concerns for distribution companies, from both a technical and an economic viewpoint, is the regulations governing the quality of supply and, in particular, service continuity. In general, to cope with reliability requirements, it is necessary to invest in distribution restructuring, aiming at an optimal choice of operating schemes and management strategies, which often include telecontrol and automation in order to obtain improved continuity levels. In this context, distribution system reliability calculation is a crucial task: it enables utilities, on the one hand, to select the most appropriate configuration and operational procedure from various available options and, on the other, to predict the increased reliability obtainable by restructuring existing systems. To provide a wide basis for comparison between different network configurations and operational strategies, this article presents a study that highlights how telecontrol and automation affect the performance, in terms of various system reliability indices, of radial, open-loop, ring, and flower configurations. The information provided by evaluation of the reliability level at which different configurations can serve customers can be used in reliability worth assessments. Finally, the article briefly discusses how to use this information from the distributor's and the customers' point of view. In this latter perspective, an economic evaluation in terms of customer outage cost (COC) is considered.