Impact to use of circuit breaker charges from different fault current growth rates

This paper presents a long-run incremental cost pricing (LRIC) model that reflects the cost caused by the changes of the circuit breakers utilisation levels in the network. The pricing focuses on evaluating the costs of advancing the circuit breakers´ upgrade consequent upon the Distributed Generator (DG) connection. In this paper, the impact to the future circuit breaker reinforcement is assessed by the connection of a new DG to different study nodes in the system. The new connection would increase fault currents throughout the network, and the magnitude of increase differs for DGs connecting at different locations. The nodal LRIC charges for the use of circuit breakers are the sum of the impact to each busbar´s fault current with and without the connection of new DG. The principle and implementation of the long-run pricing model is demonstrated on IEEE 14 busbar system with varying DG locations and fault current growth rates.