Fair Reliability Management: Comparing Deterministic and Probabilistic Short-Term Reliability Management

Fairness is considered important in various contexts. Although electricity is an essential public good in modern societies that should be affordable and accessible on a fair, nondiscriminatory basis, there is no assessment of fairness in a power system reliability context. Nevertheless, fairness might become an issue with probabilistic short-term reliability management approaches that enable system operators to differentiate between consumers based on their value of lost load. This paper focuses on equality between consumers in terms of energy not supplied. A transparent assessment of inequality in short-term power system reliability management is illustrated that uses an inequality ratio and inequality index to quantify the level of inequality between entities, such as nodes, consumer groups or individual consumers. Inequality resulting from short-term probabilistic reliability management and reliability management based on a deterministic N-1 criterion are assessed in a case study for a five-node and 24-node test system. The proposed inequality assessment enables system operators and regulating bodies to verify the social acceptability of reliability management approaches and criteria.