Determination and use of sector and composite customer damage functions

Customer interruption costs are used as surrogates in the assessment of reliability worth in electric power systems. In order to determine an optimal and reliable level of customer service, reliability cost/worth is evaluated by calculating the costs associated with different system configurations and assessing the corresponding reliability worth at the respective system load points. This paper illustrates the utilization of an existing Canadian database in the development of individual sector and customer damage functions. The approach presented is very flexible and permits the existing database to be updated as new information becomes available. A composite customer damage function is created for combinations of customer classes by weighting the individual customer damage functions using the energy consumed by each class.