Improving System Reliability of Secondary Distribution Networks Through Smart Monitoring

This paper presents results of studies of the impacts of substation monitoring on reliability indices of distribution systems. It was detected that the fault detecting and repair time was the main cause of the prolonged outages experienced in the system which increases the poor reliability indices of the system. The intelligent monitoring device detect open circuit faults and relay to the base station in 30s compared with 3 to 24 hours it was taking to detect fault. The intelligent substation monitoring device reduced the fault detection time and hence improves the reliability of distribution systems. The system was simulated, and result showed that SAIDI was reduced from 244 hours of outage per annum to just 98 hours of outage per annum while CAIDI was improved from 10 hours of interruption per outage to 5 hours of interruption per outage. This paper demonstrated that the fault detection and reporting time can be greatly reduced by the use of intelligent monitoring system and reliability indices.