Quantifying resilience for distribution system customers with SALEDI
This work addresses the challenge of measuring resilience for distribution system customers during extreme outages, but it is incremental as it builds on existing reliability indices.
The authors tackled the problem of quantifying customer impact during large blackout events, which is difficult with existing metrics, by introducing the System Average Large Event Duration Index (SALEDI) that uses logarithmic transformation of customer minutes interrupted. They demonstrated its statistical accuracy and practical application using outage data from five utilities.
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.