Valuation of planning criteria in a competitive market

The paper presents an investigation of manageability, expressional force, and conciseness of planning criteria for electrical power systems. Criteria are classified according to contingency- and customer-focused and in deterministic and probabilistic criteria. A short description is given. A number of actual German power systems with voltage levels from U/sub n/=20 kV up to U/sub n/=380 kV are investigated. Several variations of the criteria with respect to the network component types and remedial measures have been analyzed and compared. Additionally, the investigated probabilistic indices are compared by applying a significance test method. The results show that the international, widely used (n-1)-criterion is sometimes less restrictive than the investigated contingency-focused, probabilistic criteria.