Customer Outage Reduction Using AMR Data

Due to a new law that enforces distribution companies to install AMR (Automatic Meter Reading) meters, new possibilities are opened. Not only the primary purpose of AMR meters, i.e. measure the consumption at the customer side, can be beneficial but also outage management which can help reduce the unavailability of a grid. These meters have been further developed lately and new areas of use are under investigation. Distribution automation is a term that normally connects to middle voltage level substations. This technology is used to monitor and remotely control power distribution, where for example outage management is an important part. Historically, implementation of distribution automation at low voltage level has never been interested since investments have been given priority to middle voltage level which covers more customers. This thesis investigates the possibilities to use AMR meters in order to reduce customer outages, identify limits in present construction and suggest necessary modifications to improve the performance of the system. A reliability analysis of the different proposed solutions and a sensitivity analysis of the most attractive solution are also included. An investment analysis is performed, to get an idea how much the investment would cost on an implementation The result from the thesis has shown, that one of the proposed solutions which consists of a number of breakers implemented strategically in a grid, not contribute to any major improvements. The investment cost is relatively high, and the reliability analysis has shown that the amount of outages increase, while the average repair time of interrupted customers decrease. If the breakers are less expensive and their fault rate reduced, a new investigation may be of interest in the future