Failure rates in distribution networks: Estimation methodology and application

Abstract

Electric distribution companies have the responsibility of achieving the standards established by the respective regulating authorities in order to guarantee the highest quality of supply for their customers. To do so, they have to register all the electrical issues produced in the Distribution Network into a database. This paper uses this real database to make a statistical analysis of the failures that occur in distribution networks and identify the interruption causes, in order to estimate failure rates and improve the quality of electrical supply. These failure rates are used to calculate the failure probability of electrical feeders taking into account the different electrical components in them. The expected amount of failures of more than 350 feeders have been calculated and tested with the real database to prove the reliability of the method. This work also shows an application to evaluate the failure probability of alternative network configurations.