Biru, Getachew (PhD)Hailemariam, Tibebu2018-07-102023-11-282018-07-102023-11-282016-07http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/12345678/7478Since recent years, the Government of Ethiopia has been striding to transform the nation’s economy of currently predominantly agriculture lead to industrial economy. To facilitate and achieve this magnificent ambition, one of the tools at the center piece is the construction of industry zones. It is obvious that building industry zones would help the government to provide all the necessary infrastructures such as road, electricity, water, telecom services, etc. in a reliable and efficient manner. Despite these efforts by the government, as a matter of fact, electric power supply has been a source of despair and dissatisfaction both for the investors and the government due to the frequent power interruptions the industries are suffering. The main reason among others for the lack of quality and reliability of the electric power supply for these industry zones is a deficient network which is not designed and equipped to meet reliability and quality requirements. In this thesis, an assessment on the existing electricity network of Sendafa industry zone is undertaken. The performance of the existing network is quantitatively analyzed with standard reliability indicators like SAIFI (System Average Interruption Frequency Index) and SAIDI (System Average Interruption Duration) and the load flow of the network is also simulated for voltage drops and short circuit level analysis. The existing network is also observed qualitatively in terms of network configuration, contingency, and capacity to handle the increasing demand. With due research on distribution network analysis and design, the industrial network is redesigned considering all the technical and security requirements. Protection coordination calculation, reliability and load flow analysis of the redesigned industrial network is also done including the financial aspects. As discussed in chapter four, the redesigned industrial network with the proposed open loop configuration employing intelligent reclosers, SAIFI is improved by 99.7% and SAIDI improved by 99.4% and the voltage profile in all the nodes is also shown to be within limits for different scenarios. The SAIFI and SAID values of the existing network are 622 interruption/yr.customer and 571 hrs/yr.customer respectively which is too far from the national standard set by Ethiopian Electric Agency as 20 int/yr.cust and 25 hrs/yr.cust respectively. Key words: Network reconfiguration, Industry zone, DIgSILENT, Protection coordination, Distribution reliabilityenNetwork reconfigurationIndustry zoneDIgSILENTProtection coordinationDistribution reliabilityThesis