Reliability of distribution network components

The knowledge of the reliability of distribution network components is important consideration in the system planning and operation, without such knowledge it could be impossible to conduct meaningful reliability studies on power distribution systems. However, the valid data are expensive to collect. The component reliability performance statistics are not easy to obtain. There is always uncertainty associated with network component reliability. This paper presents the results of a project recently performed by the power company, Vattenfall, in Sweden. The project investigates the reliability of network components of distribution systems. The project studied extensively large sample of field outage data of distribution systems recorded by more than a hundred Swedish power utilities, and performed a series of reliability simulations to analyze how the variations in reliability of network components affect the system reliability and how the calculation results vary with respect to the uncertainty in the reliability data. The detailed reliability data of distribution network components are presented in the paper. The results of the reliability simulations are also addressed and discussed in the paper.