Balancing cost and reliability: a quantitative study at Atlantic Electric

This paper documents a system improvement study conducted by Atlantic Electric (AE) Company using EPRI's reliability analytical tools. With increased emphasis on customer service, reliability and cost control, AE is striving to balance the value of supply reliability to its customers with the costs of system improvement. The paper presents a dollar value quantification of the level of reliability inherent in a given system improvement option. Based on this quantification, the improvement option that best balances the improvement cost and the incremental reliability is selected. Reliability indices including the expected unserved energy (EUE) were computed for each improvement option. Using the EUE, the value of service unreliability to the customers was computed for each option. Dollar value based analysis is then performed to balance cost and reliability quantitatively. A selection process that a utility engineer or system planner may go through to arrive at the option that best balances the cost and reliability of system improvement is covered in the paper.