EVENT-BASED CUSTOMER INTERRUPTION COST EVALUATION
Date
2003
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ORCID
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Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Power supply failures can have serious monetary impacts on the system customers. In some jurisdictions in the new deregulated electric utility environment, system customers are receiving monetary compensation for electric supply failures. The compensation is usually related to the customer type and duration of the outage event. There is therefore increasing interest in assessing the customer costs associated with failures in electric power supply and the responsibilities associated with these failures.
The main objective of this research is to evaluate customer interruption costs for specified failure events. Considerable work has been focused on the collection of data on the monetary impact of outages and the use of this information in system planning. This
research work is focused on the development of a procedure to use existing data to estimate the monetary impacts of a specified failure on a practical distribution feeder.
This thesis describes the development of an event-based customer interruption cost evaluation procedure and the associated software designated as the EBCost Program. The results obtained using the EBCost Program show that the actual customer interruption costs depend on many factors. The absence of many of the required data sets can make it difficult to estimate precise individual customer outage costs due to a specific failure event. This thesis examines the development of a series of approximate methods. The results obtained using these approximate methods are compared with a set of base case results obtained using the EBCost Program. The approximate approaches developed provide practical alternatives to the detailed EBCost method for evaluating the customer outage costs for a specific outage event on a specific distribution feeder. The developed concepts can also be used to estimate the costs associated with a widespread outage event, i.e. a whole city. The thesis also illustrates the utilization of the approximate event cost method to minimize the overall customer interruption costs due to load shedding actions under an emergency.
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Degree
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Electrical Engineering