Defence of dissertation in the field of Power Systems and High Voltage Engineering, M.Sc.(Tech.) Niyazi Gündüz

Electric power service continuity is crucial for the users, companies and public authorities. Extreme weather events are one of the biggest challenges on the continuity of supply due to climate change. Therefore, improving reliability and hence decreasing the annual interruption is vital in terms of planning the distribution grid and power system infrastructure.

Deregulation of power distribution network, customer satisfaction, the need of electricity nowadays by industry and society have made the calculation of customer interruption costs very popular area of research. However, estimating customer interruption costs are two-sided problem, meaning the focus can be on the customers’ side or on the distribution system operators’ side.

This dissertation adopts directional distance function approach to estimate the value of the continuity of supply from the distribution network operator perspective via calculating shadow pricing of one minute of power interruption. While using this indirect analytical method, shadow prices of 78 DSOs' data have been analyzed. It was seen that shadow price of one minute of interruption for the majority of the DSOs vary between 0.4 and 0.5 € cents for the years 2013 – 2015. This is valuable information for both DSOs and for the public authorities in Finland, since the DSOs are supposed to pay standard customer compensations due to interruptions.

Opponent: Professor Samuli Honkapuro, Lappeenranta – Lahti University of Technology, (LUT), Finland

Custos: Professor Matti Lehtonen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation.

Thesis webpage

Contact information: Niyazi Gündüz, Department of Electrical Engineering and Automation, [email protected], +358503014377