Including combined-cycle power plants in generation system reliability studies

This paper presents a model to include combined-cycle power plants in generation system reliability studies. Combined-cycle power plants are energy and power limited sources, arising these bounds from the natural gas available to be burned. Natural gas availability depends on the natural gas supplies the pipeline network constraints and the natural gas demand for nonelectric purposes. Hence, the power and energy delivered by a combined-cycle power plant is a nonlinear function of its time-dependent natural gas availability. This paper present a procedure to perform power generation reliability studies including combined-cycle power plants. The procedure is based on an original model of combined-cycle power plants. This model is based on the definition of a fictitious demand which represents the combined-cycle power plant not available capacity due to lack of gas in the natural gas network and/or unavailability of the plant.