Reliability Assessment of Electric Power System with Distributed Generation Facilities

Abstract

Modern power supply systems that have distributed generation and are connected to the electric power system, renewable energy sources, and storage devices, require changes in the assessment of their reliability indices. The complexity of the energy, technological, and organizational structures of power systems with distributed generation does not allow the traditional concept of "failure" to be used to assess their reliability. Many technological solutions used in the distributed generation projects can become sources of vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of an intelligent electrical network. The study shows that power systems with distributed generation are the structures with overlapping service areas, which determines their specific features represented by an integral characteristic - efficiency. It characterizes the extent to which the use of distributed generation facilities in various operating conditions is feasible. The paper proposes an approach to quantifying the efficiency of such systems. The presented examples demonstrate the calculation of relatively simple power systems with the distributed generation that perform several tasks simultaneously.