ABSTRACT
Service Reliability and Aging Infrastructures 15.1 INTRODUCTION Modern utilities are under intense pressure to improve the quality of service for their customers, hold their prices low, yet still improve the bottom line for their stockholders. They must do more with less, a goal many long-time utility employees would point out is hardly new, but one that seems increasingly unrealistic in light of the efficiency increases, downsizings, and financial improvements that utilities have already made. This chapter highlights two particularly thorny and intertwined issues at the core of power industry concerns. One is unavoidable and inexorable: aging T&D infrastructures. Every year transmission and distribution systems, many of them already quite old, grow older still. Much of the equipment in some utility systems is nearly worn out, and more is approaching that condition each day. The present situation, its trend, the challenges it will produce, and the possible solutions utilities could adopt are discussed in Section 15.2. Section 15.3 looks at reliability of service. Providing the 99.97% availability of power that modern consumers expect is a challenge under the best of circumstances, and one exacerbated by the higher failure rates and maintenance needs of aging infrastructures. The section presents basic reliability concepts, explains the challenges an operating delivery utility faces, and discusses the means that utilities employ to manage reliability, including asset management approaches to organizing a utility’s decision-making.
