Unreliability cost assessment of an electric power system using reliability network equivalent approaches

Unreliability cost evaluation of an entire power system provides a set of indexes which can be used by a system planner to balance the investments in different segments of the system in order to provide acceptable load point (LP) reliability. This paper utilizes reliability network equivalent techniques to evaluate the customer LP unreliability cost indexes caused by outages in different segments of the power system. The equivalent multistate generator (EMG), the equivalent multistate lateral section (EMLS), and the equivalent multistate series element (EMSE) are introduced. The percentage distribution of unreliability costs for system segments is determined to find the weak segments in the system. A test system is analyzed to illustrate the application of these techniques.