282 PRODUCTI ON COST MODELS

these data will provide an additional economic measure of the generation

system.
This relatively simple example leads to a lengthy series of computations.
The results point out the importance of considering random forced outages
of generating units when production costs are being computed for prolonged
future periods. The small size of this example tends to magnify the expected
unserved demand distribution. In order to supply, reliably, a peak demand of
100 MW with a small number of units, the total capacity would be somewhere
in the neighborhood of 200MW. On the other hand, the relatively low
forced outage rates of the units used in Example 8B tend to minimize the
effects of outages on fuel consumption. Large steam turbine generators
of 600 MW capacity, or more, frequently exhibit forced outage rates in excess
It should also be fairly obvious at this point that the process of enumerating
each possible state in order to compute expected operation, energy generation,
and unserved demands, cannot be carried much further without an organized
and efficient scheduling method. For NL load levels and N units, each of which
may be on or off, there are NL x 2N possible events to enumerate. The next
section will develop the types of procedures that are found in many probabilistic
production cost programs.
of 10%.
8.3 PROBABILISTIC PRODUCTION COST PROGRAMS
Until the 1970s, production cost estimates were usually computed on the basis
that the total generating capacity is always available, except for scheduled
maintenance outages. Operating experience indicates that the forced outage
rate of thermal-generating units tends to increase with the unit size. Power
system energy production costs are adversely affected by this phenomenon. The
frequent long-duration outages of the more efficient base-load units require
running the less efficient, more expensive plants at higher than expected capacity
factors* and the importation of emergency energy. Some utility systems report
the operation of peaking units for more than 150 h each month, when these
same units were originally justified under the assumption that they would be
run over a few hours per month, if at all.
Two measures of system unreliability (i.e., generation system inadequacy to
serve the expected demands) due to random, forced generator failures are:
* Capacity factor is defined as follows.
MWh generated by the unit
(Number of hours in the period of interest)(unit full-load MW capacity)
Thus, a higher value (close to unity) indicates that a unit was run most of the time at full load.
A lower value indicates the unit was loaded below full capacity most of the time or was shut
down part of the time.
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