Restoration in Distribution Systems to Reduce Financial Losses Related to Process Trips

An important step toward a smart grid is the “smart” application of manual or automated sectionalizing switches, which can be operated in contingency conditions in order to improve the reliability indices. However, electric utilities do not have well-defined criteria for allocation of such devices. In this paper, annual financial losses related to process trips (AFLPT) are assessed taking into account - in a probabilistic manner - process immunity time (PIT) of each customer and the restoration duration of customers located upstream and downstream of the faulted section. AFLPT is used as an economic index along with collective reliability indices to select a better tradeoff between benefit and investment cost during the allocation of automated sectionalizing switches. Results show that the correlation between PIT and restoration duration allows electric utilities to identify geographic areas where economic investment in modern technologies, as self-healing, can be prioritized.