A New Reliability Strategy for Managing Assets of Customer Delivery Systems

This paper describes a new reliability strategy to drive effectively new investment decisions for the purpose of improving the overall performances of customer delivery systems (CDS's) of a transmission utility company. The strategy is simple to implement and utilizes past outage histories of system equipment and some probabilistic models and methods to rank, evaluate and improve the reliability of various CDS's. The proposed reliability strategy will enable beforehand transmission companies initially to rank CDS's based on their transmission circuit performances or station equipment performances or both. The CDS's with the worst performances will be further analyzed to evaluate the reliability of their delivery points. Finally, various investment solutions for improving the reliability of worst performing CDS's will be assessed. The new strategy will eliminate the subjective decisions and will justify actions or inactions to take. Examples of Hydro One's CDS's are used to illustrate the new reliability strategy.