Impact of Smart Grids on The Reliability of Distribution Systems

Impacto de las Redes Inteligentes en la Confiabilidad de los Sistemas de Distribución

Smart Grid conception spreads the idea about an efficient, safe and flexible electric system capable of monitoring the health of the grid, take fast actions to recovery it after a contingence and to integrate Distributed Generation near to the delivery points of energy. These characteristics aim to improve the performance of the network, to reduce the outages and the service restore time, and to give the opportunity to the customers to manage their own use of the energy.

Efficiency, reliability, cost reduction and the decrease of the CO2 emissions are the promises of the Smart Grids, in this context, this investigation aim to study the impact of different smart grid technologies in the reliability of the distributions systems.

Solutions like manual and automatic loops, distributed generation, automatic control systems, fault locators and automatic restore of the service are applied to a test radial distribution system, RBTS bus 2, with the purpose of compared their effect in the reliability indices of the system. Based on the series principle to calculate the reliability of radial systems, a software developed in Matlab is used to compare two base cases and eight test cases that apply smart techniques.

The results of the reliability case studies show that employing a convenient set of the smart grid technologies in radial power distribution system can practically diminish all the reliability indices. Furthermore, it is possible to reduce the range of variation of the reliability indices among different customers connected to the same feeder.