Modeling the impact of stochastic outages for electricity infrastructure development

Electricity systems are subject to delays in construction and outages during operation. These stochastic events have probabilities and costs that depend on local variables and system design. We present a methodology to analyze the cost and performance of different electricity infrastructure development paths in the presence of stochastic events and probabilistic parameters. Of primary interest are the impacts of long construction horizons for centralized infrastructures, variable commodity prices, random generation and transmission outages and budget instability. The methodology is demonstrated through a case study analysis of two different development paths for rural electrification in Rwanda, one that is primarily centralized and one that is primarily decentralized. We show that conventional modeling, which aggregates the effects of random events and probabilistic parameters, may understate the true costs of centralized infrastructure, as compared to explicit simulation of individual stochastic events. We show the extent to which the centralized development path can be negatively affected by disruptions to the available development budget. We also show that when consumer discount rates are high, the decentralized path can become a relatively lower cost option on a levelized basis. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.