Quantifying resilience for distribution system customers with SALEDI

TL;DR

This paper introduces SALEDI, a new resilience metric that logarithmically transforms customer outage data to better quantify the impact of large blackout events on distribution system customers.

Contribution

The paper presents SALEDI, a novel resilience metric that improves quantification of large outage impacts by addressing variability in customer minutes interrupted.

Findings

SALEDI effectively captures large outage impacts.

Compared to traditional indices, SALEDI offers better statistical accuracy.

Practical application demonstrated with data from five utilities.

Abstract

The impact of routine smaller outages on distribution system customers in terms of customer minutes interrupted can be tracked using conventional reliability indices. However, the customer minutes interrupted in large blackout events are extremely variable, and this makes it difficult to quantify the customer impact of these extreme events with resilience metrics. We solve this problem with the System Average Large Event Duration Index SALEDI that logarithmically transforms the customer minutes interrupted. We explain how this new resilience metric works, compare it with alternatives, quantify its statistical accuracy, and illustrate its practical use with standard outage data from five utilities.