Changes in the market situation and the need for efficient maintenance strategies

The liberalization of the German energy market forced the power utilities to change their strategies especially their maintenance and investment practice. In an open market the customers are free to decide where they want to buy the energy they need. The power utilities have to remain competitive and therefore they are searching for ways to invest their maintenance budget as efficient as possible. In this paper an approach which sorts every asset referring to its importance for the system performance is shown. The presented researches were done for a part of the German 110 kV transmission system in order to find the correlation between the position of the assets in the system and their importance for the system performance.