Reliability assessment of HV substations equipped with fault current limiter considering changes of failure rate of components

Owing to the increasing electricity load demand on one hand and in order to have a reliable electric network on the other hand, constructions of new transmission lines and generation sources are extremely essential. Such expansions, however, raise the fault current level which can even exceed the maximum short-circuit level rating of the circuit breakers (CBs). High fault current, in addition to the adverse effect on the CB function, can damage other substation equipment suddenly or over the time. To this end, severity of the fault current is a key factor in the substation reliability assessment. In this context, fault current limiters (FCLs) which are employed to decline the fault current level need to be precisely modelled and their impact should be extensively studied. In this study, the effect of FCL on the failure rate of substation equipment is first investigated. A computational technique for assessing the substation reliability is accordingly devised. As the location of FCL installation in a given substation or in substations with different arrangements would not be the same, various credible configurations are incorporated here. The results show that from the perspective of reliability indices, double-bus double-breaker and one breaker and a half configurations are more suitable for FCL installation.