Production costing with explicit recognition of unit duty cycle effects

A novel probabilistic production costing algorithm called the OPCOST method is presented which recognizes the stochastic nature of the duty cycle of a unit and models the generation system with explicit consideration of such operating characteristics as the system generation reserve policy, unit start-up delay, unit start-up failure, unit commitment policy, and unit outage postponability. The OPCOST method has been used to compute production costs for EPRI synthetic generating system E, reduced version. The studies of the sample system have been carried out for two production costing methods, the OPCOST method and a traditional method. A comparison of the results obtained using the traditional method and the OPCOST method shows significant differences in the energies produced by the various categories of units