Estimating the Effect of Load-shedding on Outage Rate in a Low Voltage Network

Abstract

It has been observed that Low Voltage (LV) network in Ado-Ekiti have high outage frequencies and durations. There have been incessant power outages, voltage drop and rise during peak and off–peak periods on the LV network. These are the major electricity supply challenges being experienced in the low voltage distribution networks. An investigation to the causes of the outages became necessary to determine measures to increase supply availability on the LV network. In this work, causes of LV network faults, interruptions and outages were investigated and analyzed using quantitative statistical method. In the course of the investigation, it was discovered that the average rate of outage/fault occurrence in the LV network when considered with load-shedding ranges from 0.012 to 0.039 events/hour, that is from 2-7outage event/week at an average of 5outages per transformer per week of operation while the rate without load-shedding ranges from 0.0065 to 0.021 events/hour. Prominent among the categories of outages analyzed are “no supply’’ (46.7%) and “low voltage” (40.8%). System reliability was also measured using customer and load-oriented indices as the assessment tool.