Economic implications when considering availability in the optimal design and operation of a NGCC power plant.

Abstract

- Traditionally, power plants are designed to fulfll a pre-specified external demand, usually by oversizing the existing equipment, which implies excessive capital costs and might even result in designs that cannot satisfy demands for certain situations. Therefore, in order to avoid large economic penalties if power demand is not satisfied, the design and operation of such systems need to consider the effect of reliability considerations and maintenance funds allocation on the system design and operative characteristics. In the present work, a MINLP formulation is developed to address the design and operation of power plants while considering the implications of a statespace availability modeling approach and of a comprehensive maintenance funds allocation policy. Then, the decision variables are optimized simultaneously throughout several maintenance and failure situations that configure difeerent scenarios, in order to ensure that the plant will be able to cope with them while meeting the expected requirements at minimum cost.