Features that influence composite power system reliability worth assessment

Reliability worth assessment using customer interruption costs is an important element in electric power system planning and operation. This paper deals with two features that affect the composite generation-transmission system reliability worth assessment. One feature is the incorporation of temporal variations in the cost of interruption. This paper illustrates the effect on the expected annual system outage cost of temporal variation in the interruption costs for the residential, agricultural, industrial, commercial and large user sectors. The other aspect considered in this paper is using a probability distribution approach to represent the cost of interruption model. The conventional customer damage function approach utilizes average customer costs while the probability distribution approach recognizes the dispersed nature of the customer outage data. These two methods of cost evaluation are applied to reliability worth assessment in this paper. A sequential Monte Carlo approach incorporating time varying loads is used to conduct all the studies. Case studies performed on two composite test systems show that incorporating time varying costs of interruption for the industrial sector resulted in a significant reduction in the expected outage cost. A comparison of the reliability worth obtained using the customer damage function method (CDF) with the probability distribution approach suggests that using the CDF method may significantly undervalue the reliability worth by a factor of three to four