Assessing the Impact of Investments in Distribution Planning

The expansion and development of the electricity distribution grid is a complex multicriteria decision problem. The planning definition should take into consideration the investment benefits on the security of supply, quality of service, losses, as well as in other network features. Given the variety of assets and their context-dependent effects, estimating their global impact is very challenging. An additional difficulty is the combination of different types of benefits into a simple and clear portrayal of the planning alternatives. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate the benefits of distribution investments, in terms of five features: security of supply, quality of service, network losses, operational efficiency and new services. The approach is based on the adoption of objective and measurable indicators for each feature. The approach was tested with real data of Portuguese distribution grids and the results support the adopted approach and are being used as a decision-aid tool for grid planning.