Application of resilience enhancing smart grid technologies to obtain differentiated reliability

With the introduction of smart grid technologies in the distribution network the resilience of the network can be increased. The advantage of the use of these technologies is that they could be more effective than conventional technologies in creating a local increase in the resilience of the network. This approach would allow for differentiating the reliability per (groups of) customers. Different smart grid technologies are evaluated based on how cost-effectively they can increase the local reliability. The creation of microgrids in combination with local energy storage and the reconfiguration of the network by remote switching, are the two smart grid technologies which are investigated in this paper. The use of energy storage can increase the reliability of a single node without affecting the other nodes, however the costs of implementing energy storage are still similar to the cost of conventional network reinforcement methods to locally increase the reliability. The cost of using remotely-controlled switches to increase the reliability at a single node is much lower. With this method, the increase in reliability is however not only achieved at a single node, but at other nodes as well. This makes it difficult for the DNO to charge in a fair manner for this additional reliability.