A New Generation Production Cost Program to Recognize Forced Outages

This paper dicusses a new probabilistic generation production cost program which computes the expected production costs for planning study evaluations, Most previous production cost programs have either ignored the existence of forced outages or have included their effects approximatelyby increasingthe length of scheduled outage periods or by reducing the maximum capability of the units in proportion to their forced unavailability. These approximations would seem to availability. These appoximations would seem to neglect the economic effects caused by the probability that randomly occurring unit outages will require the operation of rapidly starting, high cost peaking generation. The program described does consider these random forced outages, as well as scheduled outages. Economic loading of thermal units, consideration of the probabilistic nature of the hydro-electric energy available, and generation system reliability techniques are combined to produce expected values of production costs.