Impact of ageing on the MV asset reliability

With the opening of the market, distribution network managers have to optimize their investments. One way is cutting down asset replacement strategy, and operating a growing old network. Question raised by this strategy is whether asset failure rate is a function of time and how to model it. Asset failure rate is a crucial challenge for distribution network operators in order to optimize investment MV network investments. This paper addresses the difficult question to model the degradation of quality due to ageing and is organized as follows : The first part presents the data on which we base our study : the fault databases and the asset databases. Second Part of the document describes the methodologies used to study the impact of ageing on asset reliability Third part presents the results obtained on the French MV network over a 4-year quality feedback period.