Assessment of the impacts of voltage dips for a MV customer

Voltage dips problems often cause large financial losses to sensitive industrial and commercial customers. Worldwide many industrial customers, connected to the high and medium voltage networks, often complain about voltage dips to their network operators. A voltage dip problem becomes critical in case of the incompatibility between the power supply and the immunity of the connected devices at customer's installation. Improving the network's supply performance to reduce voltage dips would lead to huge amount of investment; whereas a process outage at a customer's installation often involves significant amount of financial losses. Therefore, an optimized solution is to be found out based on the network's yearly dip statistics and the sensitivity of the customer's installations to restrict this problem. In this paper, an industrial customer connected to a typical MV network is considered. The annual voltage dip frequency of the Dutch network is estimated and its impact on the considered customer is analyzed. Further, a methodology is proposed to define responsibilities of the different parties involved to minimize voltage dip problems.