Appraisal of Aggregate Technical, Commercial and Collection Losses in Nigerian Electricity Distribution System

From a practical point of view, no power system is free of losses. Power system losses, especially in distribution systems are usually high and result in increasing the cost of operations to the electric utilities and the price tag of electricity to the consumers. Aggregate Technical, Commercial and Collection (ATC&C) losses is a reliable parameter that reveals the true energy and revenue loss conditions of distribution systems. In this paper, mathematical models were developed for the determination of billing efficiency, collection efficiency, and ATC&C losses using Life Camp Area Office’s network of Abuja Electricity Distribution Company Plc Nigeria, as a case study. The average billing efficiency, collection efficiency and ATC&C losses for the period under review were found to be 89.73%,84.80%, and 23.79% respectively. An understanding of appraisal of these losses is important to the power system Engineers, energy policy makers, and the power firms as it enables areas of high losses in the network to be identified, which will give room for credible investment plans and subsequent monitoring of the losses. Keywords: ATC&C losses, billing, energy, distribution system, revenu

Reliability Evaluation of Hydro-Electric Power Stations in Nigeria. (A case Study of Kainji Units 1G7 & IG8 and Shiroro Units 411G1 & 411G2)

This research paper aims at evaluating the reliability performance of two units each from Shiroro and Kainji hydro electric power stations of Nigeria. The result of this study is intends to provide the basis for planning generation expansion of hydro electric power stations in Nigeria. Herein reliability evaluation based on the Frequency and Duration (F & D) approach is adopted. A set of reliability parameters which quantify generating unit reliability, are computed for each unit using the annual outage durations for the period of the study (2005-2009). The system failure probability (unavailability), frequency of system failure (FF), and the mean duration of system failure (TF) for each unit were obtained and fully discussed. The reliability of the individual unit was also computed for the period of study. The study generally shows that the generating units at Kainji Hydro Power Stations have not been adequately maintained, leading to frequent and delayed forced outage. This indicates unreliable performance of the individual units and the entire stations as compared with Shiroro Hydro Power Station.Reliability, Reliability Indices, Availability, Outage probability

Performance analysis of clustering based genetic algorithm

In this work, performance analysis of Clustering based Genetic Algorithm (CGA) proposed in the literature has been undertaken. The proposed CGA on which the performance analysis of this paper is based involve the use of two centroids based clustering technique as a new method of chromosomes selection at the reproduction stage in a typical Genetic Algorithm. Population Control and Polygamy mating techniques were introduced to improve the performance of the algorithm. Results obtained from the determination of optimal solutions to the : Sphere; Schwefel 2.4; Beale and another known optimization functions carried out in this work shows that the proposed CGA converges to global solutions within few iterations and can also be adopted for function optimization aside from the route optimization problem previously reported in Literature