Fair Reliability Management: Comparing Deterministic and Probabilistic Short-Term Reliability Management

Abstract

Fairness is considered important in various contexts. Although electricity is an essential public good in modern societies that should be affordable and accessible on a fair, nondiscriminatory basis, there is no assessment of fairness in a power system reliability context. Nevertheless, fairness might become an issue with probabilistic short-term reliability management approaches that enable system operators to differentiate between consumers based on their value of lost load. This paper focuses on equality between consumers in terms of energy not supplied. A transparent assessment of inequality in short-term power system reliability management is illustrated that uses an inequality ratio and inequality index to quantify the level of inequality between entities, such as nodes, consumer groups or individual consumers. Inequality resulting from short-term probabilistic reliability management and reliability management based on a deterministic N-1 criterion are assessed in a case study for a five-node and 24-node test system. The proposed inequality assessment enables system operators and regulating bodies to verify the social acceptability of reliability management approaches and criteria.

Review and classification of reliability indicators for power systems with a high share of renewable energy sources

“…To verify the fairness of reliability decisions in terms of reliability, system operators and regulators can use inequality indices as proposed in [82]. Third, the discussion of fairness in a power system context in literature is merely theoretical so far [82] Further development of fairness indices towards practically applicable indices requires that government and regulatory agencies determine society's preferences in terms of the definition of fairness, the consumers' perception of their peers, e.g., are consumers concerned about differences between members of the same consumer group or the same region, and a threshold of the acceptable level of unfairness [83].…”

Fairness of Power System Load-Shedding Plans

“…2 A generic discussion of unfairness in a power system reliability context and the unfairness indices can be found in [7], which is currently under review. The authors applied similar indices in [8].…”

“…7). 8 The interruption cost depends on the value of lost load for a certain load type i of a certain consumer type c (Eq. (9)).…”

Stochastic Planning and Operational Constraint Assessment of System-Customer Power Supply Risks in Electricity Distribution Networks

“…To make appropriate decisions regarding maintenance, reliability modelling considering component lifetime models is required to more accurately quantify the reliability benefits from implementing different reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) approaches. This research adopts probabilistic methods [20,21] compared to analytical methods [22][23][24] because they express output reliability indices as probability distributions rather than simple average values and standard deviations [25]. This allows for the inclusion of uncertainties in the reliability modelling that better represent the stochastic behaviour of the distribution network [11].…”