Distribution automation (DA) has long been effective at improving electric service reliability. Many DA solutions, however, meet only today's service reliability requirements and likely won't be acceptable down the road. Most local utility commissions establish outage definitions based on an outages length. This data is then used to calculate utility reliability performance metrics. In the U.S., (and often in other areas) outages up to five minutes long are not counted. Thus, its not surprising that many DA solutions available today do not improve upon but conform only to these standards, enabling utilities to meet the minimum acceptable performance requirements. These solutions cannot meet future reliability standards. Many areas outside the U.S., which already recognize the. need for better reliability performance, have outage reporting thresholds of one minute or less.
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