Puica Nitu, P.Eng, Senior Member IEEE
Senior Advisor in Energy Markets
Ontario Power Generation Inc.
700 University Avenue
Toronto, Canada

Daniel Fischer
Senior Engineer
Transmission and Distribution Technologies
Kinectrics
800 Kipling Ave.
Toronto, ON

Room BA 2165
Bahen Centre for Information Technology
University of Toronto - St. George Campus
40 St. George Street  map - code BA

This seminar aims to:

• Refresh knowledge of specialists from the power industry in reliability concepts and applications
• Give most recent perspective on aspects related to reliability

Topics discussed will be as follow:

1. RELIABILITY and SECURITY of DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

1. Security Criteria
2. Operating Strategies
3. Factors affecting Distribution Reliability
4. Customer Performance Indices
5. Outage Strategy
6. Feeder and Substation Design

2. OVERVIEW of RELIABILITY METHODS

1. Concepts of Probability Theory
2. Frequency & Duration, Minimal Cut set
3. The bathtub hazard function
4. Mean Duration of States
5. Cumulative Frequency

3. RELIABILITY INDICES of DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

1. Reliability Indices
2. Assessment of Past Performance
3. Interruption Indices: SAIFI, SAIDI, CAIDI
4. Sustained, Momentary and Multiple Interruption Indices
5. Load Based Indices
6. Review of Standard STD 1366 –2003
7. Performance based Rates-PBR
8. Why we calculate these Indices

4. RELIABILITY EVALUATION of DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

1. Ranking contingencies by their impact on the system
2. Radial Systems with Perfect/Imperfect Switching
3. Feeder Model;
4. Distribution Protection and Improvements
5. Reliability of Distributed Generation Feeders

5.  PRACTICAL METHODS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

1. Improved Customer Satisfaction
2. Feeder Telemetry
3. Monitoring and Control Capability
4. Maintenance Strategies
5. Benchmarking against Industry Practices

Puica Nitu (Senior Member, IEEE) received the M.S. degree from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Romania with major in Electrical Engineering. Puica has an extensive experience in the North American utility industry. Puica lead or was part of a team that developed large power system applications with focus on system reliability. Most recent involvements are in aspects of risk and reliability. Puica co-authored one book and over 25 technical papers. Puica has given seminars and talks to power utilities and conferences in Portugal, Japan, South Africa and Romania and at numerous North American conferences. Puica coordinated and co-authored tutorials for IEEE (2002, 2001 and 1999) and PMAPS (2004, 2000). Puica co-organized the International World Energy System Conference held in Japan, Canada and Romania. Puica currently holds the position of Senior Advisor in Energy Markets with Ontario Power Generation Inc. Puica is a registered member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Daniel Fischer is currently a Senior Engineer in the Transmission and Distribution Technologies business at Kinectrics, Ontario. Over the last two decades, he contributed to the design and implementation of advanced signal processing techniques that improved the monitoring and performance of the transmission and distribution networks. Dr. Fisher successfully applied modern Artificial Intelligence methodologies to a wide array of failure detection systems responsible for detecting underground power cable oil leaks, generator overheating, and hydro dam structure degradation. Dr. Fisher has extensive experience in both hardware and software design of systems having strong real time requirements.  Dr. Fisher has a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and a M.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering both from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from McMaster University.  He is a registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario.