Power Distribution Planning Reference Book

International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, Jan 1999 by Bollen, M

Power Distribution Planning Reference Book: H. L. WILLIS

(Marcel Dekker, 1997, 812 pp., $165)

This book discusses a wealth of details about the planning of electricity distribution networks. It treats a whole range of subjects: reliability, economic evaluation, power quality (of course!), transformers, multi-feeder layouts, distribution substations: just to mention a few. All these subjects are treated in a lot of detail, resulting in 800 pages of text. A very strong point of this book is that it not just treats one planning method as the only correct one (as done in some other distribution system books), but actually compares different methods. It even addresses some of the differences between American and European systems: great!

The book is easily readable, a bit like a Dostoyevsky novel. After having read the book the reader is supposed to know all about power distribution planning. The weak point of the book is that one has to indeed read the whole book, which is not what I would expect from a reference book. Another thing missing in this book are the equations and extended lists of references where the academics have become used to so much. But I'm not sure if that is an advantage or a disadvantage. Its a disadvantage from a scientific and probably also from an educational point of view, but the lack of equations actually makes it a better (readable) book. The author appears to have an enormous amount of knowledge about power engineering (not just about distribution planning; he also recently wrote a book about load forecasting) and the ability to write this down in a readable way.

This book is obligatory reading for instructors in this area, but do not recommend it to your students before the exam: it would only confuse them. The book is also obligatory reading for anybody who wants to know what distribution planning is about.

M. BOLLEN Department of Electric Power Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden