| In the refining industry, the cost of a power system interruption is dominated by an associated loss of production. Power distribution within a refinery includes a set of production units within a highly inter-dependent process, where the outage of a single unit affects the production of additional units. This thesis proposes a method to quantify the impact of this cascading effect, called the criticality enhancement function, in which a process reliability model is introduced to link electrical outage cut-sets with lost production. Power system criticality is analyzed using four different approaches to the calculation of annual expected impact from load point interruptions on a case study of the 125,000 barrel-per-day Petro-Canada Edmonton Refinery. This thesis demonstrates how employment of the proposed technique, with its marriage of electrical and process reliability models, enables the most accurate estimation of the impact of power system interruptions. |
