A COMPARISON OF THE ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION INVESTMENT STRATEGIES

The long-term development of the distribution networks and investment strategies is topical all over the world. Network owners and operators are facing the challenge of aging infrastructure and a need for massive reinvestments. Expectations for better reliability regardless of the state of operating (normal situation or a major event) have increased. From a business point of view, there are incentives for investments, by which the total network costs (investment costs, operational costs, and outage costs) can be minimized in the long run. Especially the role of outage costs has gained more weight on investment decisions than before. Different investments have different effects on distribution reliability. The new solutions such as low-cost primary substations, roadside building of networks, 1000 V network technology, pole-mounted switchgears etc. provide a variety of methods to increase reliability rapidly and by low costs. Nevertheless, full-scale underground cabling is only way to be prepared for major events (big storms). In this paper, different reinvestment strategies in rural area are studied.