Usable hydro capacity and electric utility production simulation and reliability calculations

The authors use conceptual arguments and tests performed with historical outage data to compare the usability of hydro capacity estimated through peakshaving to an equivalent load duration curve (ELDC) based approach. The tests found that peakshaving underestimated the usability of hydro electric capacity (overestimated hydro discounts) only slightly. In contrast, dispatching hydro against the ELDC vastly overestimated the usability of hydro capacity (underestimated discounts). The peakshaving-based hydro discount results are so close to the results obtained with historical data, and the ELDC-based results are so far from them, that according to this comparison criterion, peakshaving appears to be the preferable treatment of hydro resources in load duration curve-based production simulation or reliability models.<>