Sensitivity Study of the Cumulant Method of Calculating Generation System Reliability

The cumulant method is a very fast method for the underlying calculations which support production costing and reliability evaluations. This paper applies the method to a variety of system configurations and measures the accuracy against established methods. A surprisingly wide range of applicability is established. The method proves to be adequate for generation systems where the forced outage rates are greater than 10 percent and the largest unit is less than 10 percent of installed capacity.