A new maintenance strategy for the reduction of failure rate of distribution cables

The high failure rate of distribution cables is a nerve-racking problem for electricity supply industry. The failure of a cable could result in blackout of a certain area, often causing some disturbance to important customers. Since there are thousands of kilometers of distribution cables in a utility, the failure rate is a critical issue in electricity supply reliability. It is therefore important to implement advanced maintenance and testing strategies so that the number of in-service failures can be reduced. In this paper, is presented a new strategy which was successfully applied to the maintenance of 6.6kV cables in a utility and reduced the annual failure rate to one-third.