RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF SECONDARY DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM IN NIGERIA

A power system is set up basically to meet the demands of the customers. However, interruptions which are largely unavoidable contribute to the unavailability of power and thus prevent power system from achieving this. In most cases, it is the sustained interruptions that greatly affect both the utility company and its customers. Hence, it is necessary to find means of determining which component failure contributes most to the unavailability of the distribution system, and how this unavailability actually affects the customers. This is to enable system planners and designers to seek better ways of improving the reliability of a typical secondary distribution substation system having a single-end fed radial configuration. By using analytical method and network reduction technique, the substation reliability was analyzed based on the outage data gotten from the utility company. The conclusion from this work shows that transformer failure followed by the fuse failure contributes most to the substation’s unavailability. The overall system availability shows that the system’s performance is poor.