Generation planning with quantified outage costs

Current changes in the electric power industry in the USA encourages competition, which in turn encourages more attention to customer satisfaction. In view of these changes, in this paper we develop a generation planning model that incorporates the outage costs of customers as well as the utility. By including the customer outage cost, we attempt to take the customer satisfaction level into account. First, we review the quantification approaches for the customer outage cost, and determine a single quantification approach. Next, we estimate the customer outage cost and develop a generation planning model as a mixed integer linear programming problem. A comprehensive numerical example is provided to illustrate the key features of our model. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.