A Customer Oriented Approach for Distribution System Reliability Improvement using Optimal Distributed Generation and Switch Placement

The reliability of distribution networks is inherently low due to their radial nature, consequently distribution companies (DisCos) usually seek to improve the system reliability indices with the minimum possible investment cost. This can be known as system-oriented reliability planning (SORP). However, there can exist some customers that are not satisfied by their reliability determined by adopting the SORP and they may be eager to have a higher level of reliability. Therefore, other planning in addition of SORP is required to concern the customer viewpoint reliability. This paper introduces the customer-oriented reliability planning (CORP) in medium voltage network which is an innovative approach in the context of load point reliability. To this end, first a SORP is conducted to improve the distribution system reliability index. Then the strategy is revised and the CORP is adopted by DisCo considering involving the results obtained in SORP and the customers that have declared to reduce their expected energy not supplied (EENS). Since the surplus investment cost stem from the planning revision is received from the requestor customers, CORP can provide a proper and acceptable mechanism to fairly allocate the surplus cost to those customers. Furthermore, this problem is studied under the probabilistic nature of distribution network. Simultaneous placement of distributed generators (DGs) and automatic sectionalizing switches is implemented too with a new defined load shedding mechanism in order to enhance the reliability level for both mentioned planning frameworks.