4/5/2018

Lecture No. 11th

Distribution System Reliability

Course Teacher:
Dr. Muhammad Mohsin Aman
Course Code:
EE-524
Course Title:
Electrical Power Distribution System Engineering -1
Venue:
Department of Electrical Engineering , NED University Karachi.

11th Lecture’s Outline

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11th Lecture’s Outline

 Distribution System Reliability
 Common Disturbances In Power Systems
 Power Quality, Reliability and Availability
 Availability and No. of nines ‘9’
 Reliability Indices
 Examples

Distribution System Reliability

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Importance of Reliability
✓Distribution systems account for up to 90% of all customer reliability
problems, improving distribution reliability is the key to improving customer
reliability. To make effective improvements, a basic understanding of
distribution system functions, subsystems, equipment, and operation is
required.

Importance of Reliability
✓The electric utility industry is moving toward a deregulated, competitive
environment where utilities must have accurate information about system
performance to ensure that maintenance dollars are spent wisely and that
customer expectations are met.
✓To measure system performance, the electric utility industry has developed
several measures of reliability. These reliability include measures of outage
duration, frequency of outages, system availability, and response time.

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Common Disturbances In Power Systems

Common Disturbances In Power Systems

✓The common disturbances in a power system are
a. Voltage sag
b. Voltage swell
c. Momentary interruptions
d. Transients
e. Voltage unbalance
f. Harmonics
g. Voltage fluctuations

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Common Disturbances In Power Systems

✓ Table 1.1 describes the characteristics of these electromagnetic
disturbances. The following equipment is most susceptible to these
common disturbances:
• Programmable logic controllers
• Automated data processors
• Adjustable speed drives

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Common Disturbances In Power Systems

Short-duration Voltage Variation

✓A voltage sag (dip) is defined as a decrease in the root-mean-square (rms)
voltage 0.1-0.9pu at the power frequency for periods ranging from a half cycle
to a minute. It is caused by voltage drops due to fault currents or starting of
large motors. Sags may trigger shutdown process of controllers or computer
system crashes.

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Short-duration Voltage Variation

✓A voltage swell is defined as an increase up to a level between 1.1 and 1.8
pu in rms voltage at the power frequency for periods ranging from a half cycle
to a minute.

✓An interruption occurs when the supply voltage decreases to less than 0.1
pu for a period of time not exceeding 1 min. Interruptions can be caused by
faults, control malfunctions, or equipment failures.

Short-duration Voltage Variation

✓All these types of disturbances, such as voltage sags, voltage swells, and
interruptions, can be classified into three types, depending on their duration.
a. Instantaneous: 0.5–30 cycles
b. Momentary: 30 cycles–3 s
c. Temporary: 3 s–1 min
✓It is helpful to distinguish the term outage used in reliability terminology
from sustained interruption when the supply voltage is zero for longer than 1
min.
✓Outage refers to the state of a component in a system that has failed to
function as expected and is used to quantify reliability statistics regarding
continuity of service, whereas sustained interruptions as used in monitoring
power quality to indicate the absence of voltage for long periods of time.

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Long-duration Voltage Variation

✓An undervoltage is a decrease in the rms ac voltage to less than 90% at the
power frequency for a duration longer than 1 min. These can be caused by
switching on a large load or switching off a large capacitor bank.
✓Undervoltages are sometimes due to a deliberate reduction of voltage by the
utility to lessen the load during periods of peak demand. These are often
referred to by the non-technical term brownout.
✓An overvoltage is an increase in the rms ac voltage to a level greater than
110% at the power frequency for a duration longer than 1 min. These are
caused by switching off a large load or energizing a capacitor bank.

Long-duration Voltage Variation

✓Incorrect tap settings on transformers can also cause undervoltages and
overvoltages. As these can last several minutes, they stress computers,
electronic controllers, and motors. An overvoltage may shorten the life of
power system equipment and motors.

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Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓“Power quality” is an ambiguous term that means many things to many
people. From a customer perspective, a power quality problem might be
defined as any electric supply condition that causes appliances to malfunction
or prevents their use. From a utility perspective, a power quality problem
might be perceived as noncompliance with various standards such as RMS
voltage or harmonics.
✓In fact, power is equal to the instantaneous product of current and voltage,
and formulating a meaningful definition of power quality is difficult.

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Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓Power quality is better thought of as voltage quality. The best a utility can
do is to supply customers a perfect sinusoidal voltage source. Utilities have no
control over the current drawn by end uses and should be generally
unconcerned with current waveforms. Load current can affect voltage as it
interacts with system impedances, but voltage is the ultimate measure of
power quality.
✓Power quality is defined as the absence of deviation from a perfect
sinusoidal voltage source. Perfect power quality is a perfect sinusoid with
constant frequency and amplitude. Less than perfect power quality occurs
when a voltage waveform is distorted by transients or harmonics, changes its
amplitude, or deviates in frequency.

Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓According to this definition, customer interruptions are power quality
concerns since they are a reduction in voltage magnitude to zero.
✓Reliability is primarily concerned with customer interruptions and is,
therefore, a subset of power quality.
✓Sustained interruptions (more than a few minutes) have always been
categorized as a reliability issue, but many utilities have classified
momentary interruptions (less than a few minutes) as a power quality
issue.
✓The reasons are (1) momentary interruptions are the result of intentional
operating practices, (2) they did not generate a large number of customer
complaints, and (3) they are difficult to measure.

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Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓Today, momentary interruptions are an important customer issue and most
distribution engineers consider them a reliability issue. Therefore, most of the
literature defines reliability as all aspects of customer interruptions, including
momentary interruptions.
✓Availability is defined as the percentage of time a voltage source is
uninterrupted. Its complement, unavailability, is the percentage of time a
voltage source in interrupted.
✓Since availability and unavailability deal strictly with interruptions, they are
classified as a subset of reliability.

Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓The hierarchy of power quality, reliability, and availability is shown in
Figure .

• Availability is a subset of reliability and reliability is a subset of power quality.

• Power quality deals with any deviation from a perfect sinusoidal voltage source.
• Reliability deals with interruptions.
• Availability deals with the probability of being in an interrupted state.

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Availability and No. of nines ‘9’

Availability and No. of ‘9’

✓Availability is the probability of something being energized. It is the most
basic aspect of reliability and is typically measured in percent or per-unit. The
complement of availability is unavailability.
• Availability — the probability of being energized.
• Unavailability — the probability of not being energized.

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Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓Unavailability can be computed directly from interruption duration
information.
✓For example: If a customers experiences 9 hours of interrupted power in a
year, unavailability is equal to 9 ÷ 8760 = 0.1% (there are 8760 hours in a
year). Availability is equal to 100% - 0.1% = 99.9%.
✓With the growth of ultrasensitive loads, it has become common to describe
high levels of reliability by the number of nines appearing at the left of
availability values. Many manufacturing plants require “six nines,”
corresponding to an availability of 99.9999%. Internet data centers may
demand reliability as high as nine nines for their servers—less than two cycles
of interrupted power per year.

Power Quality, Reliability and Availability

✓Annual interruption times corresponding to various degrees of availability
are shown in Table.
✓Table shows annual interruption times associated with different levels of
availability. A developing nation may have “one nine” of availability while an
internet data center may have “nine nines” of availability for their servers.

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Reliability Indices

Reliability Indices
✓Reliability indices are statistical aggregations of reliability data for a well
defined set of loads, components, or customers. Most reliability indices are
average values of a particular reliability characteristic for an entire system,
operating region, substation service territory, or feeder.
✓The reliability index definitions provided, where applicable, follow the
recently adopted IEEE standard 1366-2003.19.

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Reliability Indices
✓Sustained interruptions are called outages by electric utilities. Current
trends in power quality standards being established are toward describing any
interruption of power longer than 1 min as a sustained interruption.
✓Two types of indices are commonly reported in literature:
1. Customer based indices
2. Load based indices

Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓The most widely used reliability indices are averages that weight each
customer equally. Customer-based indices are popular with regulating
authorities since a small residential customer has just as much importance as a
large industrial customer. They have limitations, but are generally considered
good aggregate measures of reliability and are often used as reliability
benchmarks and improvement targets.
✓Formulae for customer-based indices include (unless otherwise specified,
interruptions refer to sustained interruptions):
▪ SAIFI = system average interruption frequency index
▪ SAIDI = system average interruption duration index
▪ CAIDI = customer average interruption duration index
▪ ASAI = average system availability index

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Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓SAIFI = system average interruption frequency index (per year)

✓SAIFI is a measure of how many sustained interruptions an average

customer will experience over the course of a year. For a fixed number of
customers, the only way to improve SAIFI is to reduce the number of
sustained interruptions experienced by customers.

Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓SAIDI = system average interruption duration index (hr/year)

✓SAIDI is a measure of how many interruption hours an average customer

will experience over the course of a year. For a fixed number of customers,
SAIDI can be improved by reducing the number of interruptions or by
reducing the duration of these interruptions. Since both of these reflect
reliability improvements, a reduction in SAIDI indicates an improvement in
reliability.

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Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓CAIDI = customer average interruption duration index

✓CAIDI is a measure of how long an average interruption lasts, and is used

as a measure of utility response time to system contingencies. CAIDI can be
improved by reducing the length of interruptions, but can also be reduced by
increasing the number of short interruptions. Consequently, a reduction in
CAIDI does not necessarily reflect an improvement in reliability.

Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓ASAI = average system availability index (pu)

✓ASAI is the customer-weighted availability of the system and provides the

same information as SAIDI. Higher ASAI values reflect higher levels of
system reliability, with most US utilities having ASAI greater than 0.999.

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Reliability Indices
✓Typical target values for these indices are shown in Table. These are simply
design targets, and actual values can, of course, vary significantly from these
values, depending on the stage of power system development, utility policy,
and required reliability in the system. Elektrotek Concepts Inc. have reported
their experience with utilities in which SAIFI is usually around 0.5 and SAIDI
is between 2.0 and 3.0 h.

Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓Some less commonly used reliability indices are not based on the total
number of customers served. The Customer Average Interruption Frequency
Index (CAIFI) and the Customer Total Average Interruption Duration Index
(CTAIDI) are based upon the number of customers that have experienced one
or more interruptions in the relevant year. Formulae for these indices are:

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Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓On the surface, CAIFI seems similar to SAIFI. One large difference is that
the lowest possible value for SAIFI is zero and the lowest possible value for
CAIFI is one.
✓Reducing the number of interruptions that a customer experiences from 2 to
1 will improve CAIFI. However, reducing the number of interruptions that this
same customer experiences from 1 to 0 will make CAIFI worse. Improvements
in CAIFI do not necessarily correspond to improvements in reliability.
✓CTAIDI has the same difficulties as CAIFI since it can be improved by
increasing the number of customers that experience a single interruption.

Load-Based Reliability Indices

✓Two of the oldest distribution reliability indices weight customers based on
connected kVA instead of weighting each customer equally. Because of this,
the following are referred to as load-based indices:

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Load-Based Reliability Indices

✓The reason for load-based indices predating customer based indices is
pragmatic.
✓In the past, utilities knew the size of distribution transformers but did not
know how many customers were connected to each transformer. When a
protection device operated, interrupted transformer kVA was easily
determined while interrupted customers required estimation. Today, customer
information systems (CIS) associate customers with transformers and allow
customer based indices to be easily computed.
✓From a utility perspective, ASIFI and ASIDI probably represent better
measures of reliability than SAIFI and SAIDI. Larger kVA corresponds to
higher revenue and should be considered when making investment decisions.

Reliability Indices Examples

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Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓Calculate the following indices in minutes for the 28th day of a month.
Table shows time, no. of customers interrupted and duration in minutes.
Customers-hours is calculated from column 3 and 4.
✓The utility has 50,000 customers.
Interrupti Customers Duration (in Customer
on No. minutes) Hours
1 10 90 15
2 1000 20 333.33
3 2 175 5.83
4 1 120 2.00
5 1 38 0.63
1014 443 356.80

Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓Calculate the SAIDI for the 28th day of a month in minutes.

SAIDI 
 Customer Intreuption Durations (hr/yr)
Total Number of Customers Served

356.08  60 customers - min 21408

SAIDI    0.428min
50000 customers 50000

✓This says that the average customer was out for 0.428 minutes on the 28th
of the month. If the SAIDI is calculated for each day, the monthly SAIDI is
found by summing daily values.

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Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓What is CAIDI for the previous example?

CAIDI 
 Customer Intreuption Durations
Total Number of Customers Interuptions

✓The customer-minutes are 21,408 and 1,104 customers were interrupted on

the 28th of the month.

21,408
CAIDI   21.1min
1,014
✓On average, any customer who experienced an outage on the 28th was out
of service for 21.1 minutes.

Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓What is SAIFI for the previous example?
Total No. of Customer Interuptions
SAIFI  (per yr)
Total Number of Customers Served
1,014
SAIFI   0.02
50,000
✓This says that on the 28th of the month, the customers at this utility had a
0.02 probability of experiencing a power outage. SAIFI can also be found by
dividing the SAIDI value by the CAIDI value. SAIDI
SAIFI 
CAIDI
✓With a SAIDI of 0.428 minutes and a CAIDI of 21.1 minutes the SAIFI is
0.428
SAIFI   0.02
21.1

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Customer-Based Reliability Indices

✓Calculate the CAIFI for the previous example?

✓From our previous example, on 28th there were 1,104 customers interrupted
during 5 separate events and the total number of customers served by the
utility is 50,000 so,
5
CAIFI   0.005
1,014
✓This says that the average number of interruptions for a consumer who was
interrupted is 0.005 times.

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