Cost benefit assessment of a weather forecasting system for asset management at Fortum Distribution

Background
Extreme weather conditions have during the last decade resulted in wide spread power outages in several regions in Sweden. The effect of these outages, besides the direct and indirect costs to the utilities and their customers, is an increasing mistrust among the general public regarding the utilities ability to cope with situations out of the ordinary. In an age where society is becoming more and more vulnerable and dependant on wellfunctioning infrastructure, it seems that the utilities have become less able to provide the required levels of service. Whether the utilities have a lower ability to respond to the challenges or if the requirements from society have increased is debatable. Regardless, new legislation has been introduced that requires utilities to compensate their customers for loss of power in excess of 12 hours.

In view of this situation it is becoming more and more important for utilities to be able to cost effectively respond to the effects of extreme weather. However, such response requires that the utility prepares stores of spare parts in strategic locations, that it has repair crews standing by and that the customer service teams are prepared to meet the questions for the general public. All such actions are of course costly, and it is not possible to have these resources available around the clock all days of the week. Instead, the resources could be put on different stages of alert, depending on the perceived severity of an incoming storm or similar. A forecasting system using input data from weather services, geographic information, historical data etc, can potentially be used to predict the need of emergency resources to be activated ranging from mere information on a web page to calling in repair crews from neighboring ar-eas and dispersing mobile power plants in the network area.

The master thesis is a cooperation between Fortum Distribution and the department for Industrial Information and Control Systems at KTH.

Goal of the project
The primary goal of the project is to assess the costs and benefits of a forecasting system that recommends emergency actions to be taken to remedy the effects of an incoming severe weather front. The benefits shall include both tangible benefits such as reduced costs and in-tangible benefits such as increased customer confidence. On the costs side, the development and maintenance costs shall be investigated and included.

Additionally, the project goal is to add to the ongoing development of generic methods for cost benefit assessment of IT systems for operation and maintenance of electric power systems.

Last day for application is 30 November 2007