Study of alternative strategies for rural area distribution network development

Abstract

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.

Cabling renovation concept in large‐scale renovation of rural area networks

“…Until now, cabling of rural MV networks has been rare, but the current trend is increasingly towards underground electricity distribution, which also provides a weather‐proof solution (Olofsson et al , 2007; Bengtsson et al , 2009; Marttila et al , 2008, 2009). Preparation against major storms is one of the primary incentives for UGC also in rural areas.…”