The Impact of the Installation of Smart Meters on Distribution System Reliability

Power interruptions cause losses, for consumers and for the utility, but it is necessary in order to make improvements in the power distribution system and also for protective devices operate when an outage occurs. Therefore, it is important that utilities perform the service for emergency occurrences as quickly as possible, reducing the time of the outage. Brazilian National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) requires the utilities send every month their average service time, regulating the quality of the service, and determines the maximum length of interruptions for each set of Consumer Units and also their maximum quantity of occurrences. Therefore, reducing measures in service time is a great interest of utilities. The installation of smart meters allows that the distribution company be informed of the interruption at the same time it occurs, also determining the fault location, everything because of two-way flow of information between the meter and the control center. Thus, the time of fault location is reduced, resulting in reducing the time of the occurrence service and total interruption time for those consumers achieved. Thus, there is impact on the system average interruption duration index (SAIDI), increasing system reliability. In addition to this gain, there is a reduction of expected energy not supplied (EENS). In this context, the evaluation of the SAIDI and EENS reduction because of the replacement of conventional meters with smart meters.