The Business Case for Distribution Automation

摘要

Service reliability has become an increasingly important issue to today's utilities for several reasons. One, of course, is that most customers take their uninterrupted supply of electricity for granted—notwithstanding rare events like the August 14, 2003, cascading blackout. Another is tighter regulation. More than 30 state public utility commissions have initiated rulemak-ing or proceedings targeting distribution system reliability. These initiatives run the gamut from establishing formal reliability metrics to informally acknowledging issues demanding attention. Although meeting or failing to meet reliability standards such as outage frequency and interruption duration may or may not result in a monetary reward or penalty, reliability metrics are a key element in an increasing number of performance-based ratemaking programs.