Power system reliability planning practices in North America

The authors present selected results from a recently completed research project for the Electric Power Research Institute. One component of the project was intended to develop and test methodologies for gathering data on how utility customers value service reliability, as measured by either the cost of outages or the willingness to pay for reliability. Another component of this project involved a survey of current and emerging reliability planning practices in the North American utility industry, especially regarding interest in value-based reliability planning. The results of the survey, including the survey design and methodology, are given. The authors briefly discuss potential applications of interruption costs in generation and composite system reliability planning