Assessment of the reliability of Indiana\u27s electricity generation system

The objective of this research is to determine the adequacy of the rule-of-thumb reserve margin for Indiana\u27s electricity generation system and the adjustment of the reserve margin if needed, given the portfolio of generation capacity of Indiana. The purpose of doing this is to ensure a reasonable level of system reliability, an appropriate level of generation resources and electricity prices for consumers that balance reliability and low cost. 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), which is a reliability index, for Indiana\u27s 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, we get the new reserve margin for each load model. For 2003 and 2004, current reserve margins were adequate regardless of whether the hourly load model or daily peak load model is used. For 2005, the reserve margin is required to increase around 0.1 percent when the hourly load model is used or increase around five percent when the daily peak load model is used