Electricity demand has grown over the past few years and will continue to grow in the future. The increase in electricity demand is mainly due to industrialization and the shift from a conventional to a smart-grid paradigm. The number of microgrids, renewable energy sources, plug-in electric vehicles and energy storage systems have also risen in recent years. As a result, future electricity grids have to be revamped and adapt to increasing load levels. Thus, new complications associated with future electrical power systems and technologies must be considered. Demand-side management (DSM) programs offer promising solutions to these issues and can considerably improve the reliability and financial performances of electrical power systems. This paper presents a review of various initiatives, techniques, impacts and recent developments of the DSM of electrical power systems. The potential benefits derived by implementing DSM in electrical power networks are presented. An extensive literature survey on the impacts of DSM on the reliability of electrical power systems is also provided for the first time. The research gaps within the broad field of DSM are also identified to provide directions for future work.

The penetration of photovoltaic (PV) systems in power grids has substantially increased since the recognition of renewable energies. In a high solar-integrated network environment, an accurate forecast of the expected solar energy output is vital. One of the important factors that influence such forecast is the failure rates of PV systems. Therefore, a new and realistic reliability model of the PV system is proposed in this study. In contrast to the conventional reliability model, which uses fixed values of failure rates in a year, the proposed model considers various weather conditions, detailed PV system architecture, manufacturing quality and other necessary materials to determine the time-varying failure rates of the PV system. Results reveal that the proposed model produces monthly failure rates that are considerably different from the fixed yearly failure rate in which the difference in high latitude regions is more significant than that in tropical climate regions.

Integrations of renewable energies, particularly solar and wind, are increasing worldwide due to carbon emission reduction efforts and maturing technologies that have driven down the cost of their energy productions. Due to the intermittency of these renewable sources, the battery energy storage system often coexists alongside solar/wind energy systems. Integrating these two aspects into power systems requires the consideration of reliability, social wellbeing and environmental factors, which collectively form a multi-objective optimization problem that this paper aims to solve with the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm. The proposed method is able to find optimum solutions that are equally beneficial to all factors – Pareto front – without being heavily biased to any one of them. The proposed method is separated into two parts by first optimizing the penetration of solar/wind energy, followed by the optimization of the energy storage capacity in the second part. The fuzzy decision making method is utilized to select a preferred solution from the Pareto front based on the assignment of the membership function values to reflect operator’s preferences. The proposed method was implemented on the IEEE Reliability Test System overlaid with the real sampled weather data. The proposed objectives in the optimization problem are also practical and useful for the expansion of generation systems.

Power systems has been subjected to significant upgrades in terms of structure and capacity. Reliability evaluation of composite power systems has surfaced as an essential step in operation and planning stages of the modern power system. It is an effective tool to investigate the ability of power systems to supply customers with reliable power service. The purpose of this review is to enhance the knowledge of reliability studies conducted on composite power systems by providing a critical and systematic review. This work investigates peer-reviewed articles published between 2007 and 2017 in three reliable databases. The findings reveal that the reliability of composite power systems has received considerable attention over the last few years. Secondly, investigation studies demonstrated a crucial role in verifying the impact of adopting new technologies. Third, studies on this topic have been intensively conducted in Asia, which highlights the promising sectors in these regions. However, researchers have generally focused on developing several aspects (e.g., evaluation speed and wind power integration) at the expense of others (e.g., realistic studies and other renewable energy resources). The lack of practical applications is evident in the surveyed publications. These findings imply a potential incoordination between the needs of the real applications and researchers’ tendencies. Future reliability evaluation scholars are advised to consider the findings of this systematic review including concentrating on insufficiently covered topics and enhance the coordination among the efforts devoted in this area.