An improved method for power system generation reliability assessment

The objective of this paper is to present an advanced probabilistic method for estimating power system reliability. The new method allows consideration that several generating units can share the same source of failure, which causes them to fail or become unavailable simultaneously. These improvements are achieved by the implementation of the common-cause failures. A mathematical derivation of the method is presented. The method is tested on a standard power system. The results show, that if common-cause failures of several generating units are considered, more detailed outage states of generating units can be defined. Consequently, more detailed power system reliability analyses can be performed. The results show that the estimated power system reliability decreases, if common-cause failures of several generating units are considered.