Concurrent impacts of automation and demand response on utilities reliability costs in Performance Based Regulation scheme

The purpose of this study is to identify the impacts of demand response programs and automation on utilities reliability costs. To address this aim, a survey is conducted to determine correlations between utilities reliability costs and networks reliability indices. Regulators for reliability, assign penalty and reward which is called Performance Based Regulation (PBR) to companies. In distribution networks, operation of companies is often evaluated by means of indices like SAIDI and SAIFI in PBR strategy by regulators. If the reliability index is more than upper threshold, the company will be punished by PBR; and if the reliability index is lower than low band of threshold, the company will be encouraged by PBR. Demand response programs and automation technologies can protect system against load variations and outages. Automation can greatly improve distribution-network reliability by speeding up service restoration and thus significantly reduce the outage time. In this paper, by assuming a PBR curve, the impact of using demand response program and automatic switch application for decreasing reliability cost of utilities is discussed. Finally, the extra costs which are paid for switches´ automation and persuasion of costumers are going to be checked out. The impact of PBR curve will be considered in all of these studies.