Assessment of the reliability of Indiana´s electricity generation system

The objective of this research was to determine the adequacy of the rule-of-thumb reserve margin for Indiana´s electricity generation system and the adjustment of the reserve margin. To achieve the objective, a statistical model is constructed to evaluate system reliability. Monte Carlo Simulation is applied to build the capacity availability probability distribution as the generation model. Hourly loads and daily peak loads of 2003, 2004 and 2005 are used to form the load models. Then, the generation model and the load model are convoluted to calculate the loss of load probability (LOLP) for Indiana´s electricity generation system. Results show that the reliability standard is more than satisfied for 2003 and 2004. However, for 2005, the estimated LOLPs do not satisfy the standard, suggesting capacity expansion for the system is needed. By uniformly shifting load curves up or down to adjust the estimated LOLPs until the industry standard is satisfied, the new reserve margin for each load model is found. This analysis suggests that even for 2005 only a small increase in generating capacity is needed.