Aspects to the need of a powerful statistics of incidents in a liberalized electricity market

The competitive situation in the European liberalized electricity market leads to a change in the need of detailed information to describe the quality of supply. Especially the quantitative determination of the quality of supply for power systems as well as for single customers or nodes in the investigated systems is of increasing importance. The basis for such activities is a powerful data collection which represents the behavior of electrical power systems as given in Germany by the VDEW "Statistics of Incidents". The paper describes content and application of the VDEW "Statistics of Incidents". Actual developments to fulfill the latest requirements and activities to improve the attractiveness of the statistics are described. The possibilities for analyses and applications of the results are highlighted. Future needs and developments are outlined e.g. the importance as the main data source for reliability indices as input for reliability analyses