The Canadian Electrical Association approach to transmission and distribution equipment reliability assessment

The Canadian Electrical Association (CEA) is an electric utility based organization for exchanging information on technical, marketing and managerial problems of mutual interest to its members. CEA adopted a proposal in 1975 to create a national facility for centralized collection, processing and reporting of reliability and outage statistics for electrical generation, transmission and distribution equipment. The generation equipment reporting system was inaugurated in 1977. The transmission equipment stage of the information system was implemented in 1978 and since that time eight reports have been issued with each report covering five years of data. The distribution equipment stage of the information system was completed in 1993 and Canadian utilities are now beginning to supply data based on agreed procedures. This paper illustrates the philosophies adopted by Canadian utilities for the collection of transmission and distribution equipment data. The paper concentrates on transmission and distribution equipment data collection and illustrates the definitions and indices used to assess the functional components in these domains.