Probabilistic production simulation including combined heat and power plants

Expansion planning of combined heat and power systems requires simulation tools for estimating key indicators for decision making. For power systems, so-called probability production simulation techniques have been used extensively. These techniques have been extended to include combined heat and power (CHP) systems with a single heat area and back-pressure type CHP units. In this paper, existing simulation methods for CHP are extended to include extraction power plants. Furthermore, the case of multiple heat areas is addressed and three different simulation strategies are presented for such systems. The results show that an assumption of perfectly correlated heat demands in all heat areas gives results that are very similar to a general case, whereas working with a system with all heat areas aggregated into one gives rather poor results. It is demonstrated that it is possible to use the traditional concepts and methods for power-only analysis on a CHP system. Additional concepts are presented, depending on the heat criterion applied. It is concluded that probabilistic production simulation including CHP units can be performed with reasonable effort and accuracy. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.