Reliability Assessment of Utilities Using an Enhanced Reward-Penalty Model in Performance Based Regulation System

As a consequence of deregulation in power system, forming competition market is unavoidable. In this condition, electric distribution utilities in order to increase their revenues and to enable for competition with other utilities are forced to improve their reliability and power quality indices. Under this environment, customer services will probably be sacrificed by utilities for reliability cost cutting. Therefore a performance based regulation (PBR) has been introduced to balance between customer service qualities and utilities service costs and control the utilities act by reward-penalty model. This paper applies different reward-penalty models that had been introduced in recent papers using real system reliability data from Tehran regional electrical company (TREC) and presents their applications and properties. A multi steps reward- penalty model for increasing accuracy of PBR is developed. A suitable reward-penalty model and dead-zone for system regulators is presented in this paper to set initial PBR. The paper develops a new approach to obtain value of reward and penalty for each utility using reward-penalty model based on combination of some reliability indices with their weights.