ABSTRACT
For many in the electricity industry, distribution is the “holy grail.” Unlike transmission and generation, distribution is typically not redundant and is the source of part of the grid where outages occur, such as from downed tree limbs and other weather-related events. With the exception of customers with backup sources, such as some larger commercial customers or dual feeds such as hospitals, the loss of a distribution feeder usually means that affected customers are without power. Moreover, the fact that all premises need to be served wherever they are located means that utilities must develop some creative and often ad hoc strategies to serve remote and economically disadvantaged communities, where the revenues often do not cover the cost of the capital improvements required to serve them, thus adversely impacting the utility’s bottom line, and resilience often has to be sacri˜ced in order to support the capital investment required to serve marginal loads. The primary purpose of the electric distribution system is delivering reliable power to all premises every second of every day. Establishing or enhancing distribution automation means customers would experience fewer and shorter outages, reduced time required by ˜eld crews to restore power when outages occur, identifying weaknesses in distribution system components, and a safer and more secure work environment. In practice, this means pushing intelligence closer to the edge of the grid to not only report events back to a centralized location for analysis and further action, but also to execute localized and automated responses. Sophisticated applications running in conjunction with substation and distribution transformers can be designed to monitor activity and to adjust settings and even interrupt power in the event of a severe disruption.
