Impact of rural design, operating, and restoration practices on the costs of service interruptions

Service reliability indices of individual customers are shown to be dependent upon their physical location within a distribution circuit configuration, the protective equipment used in a predefined protection-coordination scheme, and the activities involved in isolating and restoring continuity of service following a circuit outage. The cost of service interruptions to individual customers is dependent upon the duration of the service interruptions, which is dependent upon many of the factors already listed. The `zone branch concept´ is applied to evaluate individual service reliability indices of a distribution circuit and to demonstrate the significant impact of various operating and restoration practices on service reliability levels and the costs of these interruptions. A detailed list of references on the costs of interruptions to residential, commercial, and industrial customers is presented