Technical and economic assessment for deployment of distribution automation equipments - enabling self-healing strategies

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate technical and economic benefits achieved by deploying remotely operated switching devices (ROSDs) envisaging Self-Healing strategies. The network is firstly divided in several zones, having pre-existent ROSDs as boundaries and selecting the zone with higher energy not supplied (ENS). Thereafter, a failure event on the selected zone is evaluated with a cost/benefit analysis in the entire equipment life-cycle. Thereunto cost of energy not supplied, reduction on the electricity sales during the interruption, customer compensations and regulatory penalties/benefits associated with the quality of service are taken into account. This approach was applied to a real Portuguese distribution network for a case study. Reliability improvement as well as a payback period within equipment life cycle were achieved and presented.