Reliability importance measure of energy producers from energy consumers’ perspective

There is an increasing trend in consideration of the electricity-supply quality in modern power systems. One of the quality-related aspects is the desired level of reliability at the points of electrical-energy consumption or load points. In this regard, the system operator needs to evaluate the impact of system components on the reliability at the considered load points. “Reliability importance” is a quantitative index in order to measure this impact. The reliability importance measure in most of the conventional methods is on the basis of the risk sensitivity analysis. Such an analysis imposes prohibitive computational burden in large power systems. Considering these points, this paper proposes an approach to evaluate the reliability importance which is not suffered from the immense computational burden. The proposed method determines reliability importance of the electrical-energy producers or generators from the consumers or load points perspective in a selected area of the power system. In order to do so, generators are ranked according to their impact on the mentioned area. This impact is measured on the basis of the effect of generators on power-flows in the lines which cross boundary of the selected area. Capacity and unavailability of the generators are also considered in the ranking calculations. Applicability and computational efficiency of the proposed method is validated through studies conducted on two test systems.