Spreadsheet approach to production costing-case study for a municipal utility

A case study is presented of a municipal utility using electronic spreadsheets for production costing. The data are used as a testbed for comparing alternative techniques for handling forced outages, including Monte Carlo methods, probability generating functions, and an enumerative approach. The spreadsheet models are validated by comparison with an established mainframe program, EPRI´s BENCHMARK. The results demonstrate clearly the importance of modeling economy sales on the spot market in assessing the overall costing performance of utilities