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Many major disturbances in the electricity supply have taken place in the last decade causing significant problems in the functioning of the modern society. In major disturbances there are multiple organizational actors like fire and rescue services, emergency response centres, police and municipalities along with distribution system operators (DSOs) and network repairers involved in the management of disturbance situations. In previous studies, lack of inter-organizational situation awareness in disturbance situations has been noticed. After the storms in Finland in 2011 it was proposed that DSOs should be obligated to co-operate with public authorities and deliver information to them in major disturbances. The paper presents a demonstration of the inter-organizational situation awareness system developed in this research and compares it with other systems. The aim of the comparison is to find similarities and differences in the systems so that the situation awareness in major disturbances of the electricity supply could be improved.

Network planning methods will be changed in future because of the economic regulation and importance of reliability of electricity distribution. Usually rural area networks are carried out with overhead lines but overhead lines are vulnerable to faults caused by the weather and therefore new strategies are needed to develop rural area networks. Reliability increasing actions could be profitable if interruptions are taken into account as outage costs. With the advanced reliability analysis tool, the effect of different strategies of rural area network development can be studied. The calculations show that traditional strategies are no longer profitable. In future climate change and major storms might have bigger influence on the reliability of electricity distribution. In this paper the impact of major storms has been taken into account and some calculations have been made with different climate change scenarios.

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