Increasing the availability of the medium voltage network in the Netherlands

The electricity supply in the Netherlands, to an average domestic customer, can be considered to be one of the most reliable of the world. As an average, every 5 years a customer will be confronted with a failure in the public electricity supply system. On an annual basis, this results in an outage time of less than 20 minutes. Because approximately 15 minutes of the above mentioned outage time is due to faults in the medium voltage network, it is obvious to concentrate on medium voltage when one wishes to increase power system availability. In this paper, a relatively simple and economical solution is discussed to increase the availability of the MV power network. It is based on the remote reading of (self-resetting) short-circuit indicators in the power network. After a description of the functionality and use of the indicator itself, the paper concentrates on the remote reading and its impact on the availability of the network. It is shown that considerable search time can be saved in faulty situations, by almost immediate knowing the failure´s location in the power network