The intermediate-term security assessment of a power generating system

This study evaluates the capability of a generating system to meet its load demand over an intermediate-term horizon with a well-defined schedule of planned outages. The evaluation considers the random nature of the future system capability and demand. The present study extends steady state Markov models of generating capacity in two ways: [1] Introduces more general, semi-Markov models of generating units. [2] Computes security measures which depend upon the transient behavior induced by the schedule of planned outages. The semi-Markov models are based on statistical analysis of the ten year outage history of four identical 200-MW coal-fired generating units. The transient behavior arises from knowledge of the start-up times of the units which have been on planned outage.