A probabilistic process to balance reliability and cost for a station design

This paper presents a probabilistic process for selecting a station design by balancing cost and reliability. Four station designs were evaluated using reliability indexes and economic analysis to come up with the most cost effective and reliable design overall. For each design option, we performed an economic analysis using net present value (NPV) of total costs (capital, O&M, and outage). We then used the analysis results to rank the options. A number of sensitivity studies on the NPV of total cost were conducted to examine the effect of varying major parameters on the ranked options. The process was applied to a real case study performed for one of the Idaho Power Company (IPC) substations.