Customer costs due to major voltage disturbances: Estimations for an urban distribution network in Switzerland

Power quality (PQ) is moving into focus, as the integration of renewable distributed generation affects an increasing number of sensitive electronic apparatus. Statistics about major voltage dips or swells are rare. Reliability measures of outages (SAIDI, SAIFI) have been in the foreground so far. ewz, a Swiss urban network operator, is building a representative network of PQ measurement points, which will enable ewz to monitor PQ-indices like SARFI-X, SARFI_curve and SARFI_system and to estimate customer costs caused by voltage disturbances. First results of the network´s SARFI counts and of a PQ cost model are presented. A comparison of the costs per capita with other countries shows corresponding values.