Distribution system reliability improvements justified by increased oil production

Due to increasing competitive pressures, as well as customer demands, there is renewed service reliability interest in the electric power industry. This paper discusses the reliability improvement of overhead distribution feeders serving oil-pumping facilities. Instantaneous tripping of the substation circuit breaker, followed by immediate reclosing, can be effective in restoring service for temporary faults on the line. However, any fault on the overhead system results in significant lost production since all pumps served by the feeder are interrupted, and some of the deep well pumps have long restart times. An effective means of improving reliability is the use of an additional level of sectionalization. By designing the system with optimized layers of reliability zones, the total barrels of oil produced in a given year will increase due to the reduction in average down time per pump. The engineering study cost justified additional equipment installation to improve reliability based on the value of the increased production. In addition to the reliability improvement study methodology, a discussion of the economic justification is included in the paper.