Impacts of Station-Related Failures on Distribution System Reliability.

Substation-related failures can have an observable influence on the reliability of the individual load point connected to a distribution system. This paper investigates the impacts of station-originated, distribution-originated, and distribution-station–originated failures on the load point and system reliability indices of a distribution system. A hierarchical analysis approach incorporating reliability network equivalents is used to separately evaluate the effect of each system segment and to minimize the repeated calculations. Minimum path and cut set techniques are utilized in the evaluation. A recursive search algorithm is used to find minimum paths from the bulk supply point to the loads and the area affected due to a failure event. A test distribution system is utilized to illustrate the proposed technique. Results in the form of basic reliability indices and the expected customer outage costs are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]