Distribution system reliability risk assessment using historical utility data

This article describes the research conducted on the use of historical performance data in assessing the financial risk for a power distribution utility in a performance based regulation (PBR) regime. The historical utility data used in this research are taken from the Canadian Electrical Association (CEA) annual reports. The objectives of this article are to examine and analyze the variations in the annual performance indices of the participating utilities including the overall indices and the cause code contributions, and to examine the possible utilization of historic utility reliability indices to create suitable reward/penalty structures in a PBR protocol. The potential financial risk analyses for these selected utilities are conducted using their historical performance data imposed on a number of possible reward/penalty structures developed in this article. An approach to recognize adverse utility performance in the form of major outage years (MOY) is developed considering the influence of the MOY performance in PBR decision making.