An efficient method for generating capacity reliability evaluation including the effect of planned outages

The authors present an efficiency method of generation capacity reliability evaluation that includes the effects of planned outages. The conventional approach to this problem is to compute weekly indices and combine them to obtain the annual indices. The proposed approach develops a composite load model for the year in which the effect of units of maintenance is included by a deconvolution procedure. The composite load model is then used to calculate the annual indices. The proposed approach is shown to be accurate and many times faster than the conventional approach. The improvement in computation time is shown to depend on the number of units, the average fraction of units on planned outage per week, and the number of seasons in a year for the purpose of unit parameter variations. It is observed that for most practical applications, improvements of at least three times are possible