Fairness and inequality in power system reliability: Summarizing indices

•Fairness is essential for the social acceptability of power system decisions.•Widely studied economic tools are useful to assess fairness of service reliability.•Proposed generic indices can quantify overall and individual equality and equity.•Proposed indices outperform currently used variance and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Electric power systems research 2019-03, Vol.168, p.313-323
Main Authors: Heylen, Evelyn, Ovaere, Marten, Proost, Stef, Deconinck, Geert, Van Hertem, Dirk
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Decisions
Electricity distribution
Fairness
Gini coefficient
Inequality
Inequity
Measurement
Power reliability
Power supply
Power system reliability
Reliability analysis
System reliability
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Summary:•Fairness is essential for the social acceptability of power system decisions.•Widely studied economic tools are useful to assess fairness of service reliability.•Proposed generic indices can quantify overall and individual equality and equity.•Proposed indices outperform currently used variance and standard deviation.•Proposed Gini-based indices facilitate interpretation via a bounded zero-one scale. As the power system is undergoing major changes that affect different stakeholders unequally, power system literature increasingly recognizes the importance of fairness. This paper focuses specifically on the concept and quantification of fairness in the context of power system reliability. Power system decisions not only affect the overall, system reliability level, but also the reliability level for individual end-users, such as generators, flexibility providers and end-consumers, depending on their location and characteristics. We analyze and propose Gini-based and variance-based fairness indices. The proposed indices summarize the inequality and inequity of the distribution of reliability between different entities in power systems in a single number, which is a measure of the perceived fairness of the reliability level. These indices allow decision makers to assess the effect of power system decisions on fairness of reliability, to track it over time and to take appropriate actions to decrease unfairness. This will help to ensure the social acceptability of power system decisions. The use of the fairness indices is illustrated using two case studies: real reliability data and system development.
ISSN:0378-7796
1873-2046
DOI:10.1016/j.epsr.2018.11.011