Outage costs quantification for benefit–cost analysis of distribution automation systems

Deregulation of electric power industry has motivated electricity customers to pay more attention in evaluating both the direct cost of electric service and the monetary value of reliable electric service. This movement has been recognized by the utilities and the value-based aspects are introduced into the planning and design of power systems to consider the outage costs. The value of service reliability that can portray and respond to actual utility and customer impacts as a result of power interruptions plays a major role on justifying whether a distribution automation (DA) system is beneficial or not. However, for the value of service reliability, there are a number of factors that can affect it. To exactly evaluate the service reliability value, two formulas for quantifying the customer interruption costs and utility reduced energy revenues associated with power failures are derived in this paper. The customer types, feeder loads, feeder failure rate, number of switch, restoration time, and repair time are taken into account. The proposed formulas can provide an exact estimate in outages costs of a feeder and their computation is simplified and straightforward. The estimated outage costs can then be used to calculate the reliability improvement benefit of DA systems for the system benefit–cost analysis. A practical DA system implemented by Taiwan Power Company is used to illustrate the proposed formulas and the benefit–cost analysis result is presented. Sensitivity analysis is also performed to reduce the effects of benefit–cost analysis parameters on the analysis result.