| The electric utility industry, in its transition from a regulated to a deregulated environment, faces several technical, economical and political issues. This dissertation addresses some of the technical issues and proposes some novel solutions.; In the past, utilities used historic forced outage rates (FORs) to compute system production costs. In the competitive environment, operating policies undergo drastic changes. In such a situation, the continued usage of historic FORs will result in erroneous production cost and reliability computations. The existing models to calculate reliability and/or production costs incorporate the operating considerations that existed in the past. In this dissertation, these models are re-invented to accommodate the operating considerations in the new, deregulated environment. The transmission constraints in the system affect the duty cycles of generating units, which are reflected in production cost/reliability calculations. The new model also takes into account the presence of transmission constraints in the system. A study incorporating the above features was carried out on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) system. The production cost and system reliability were computed using the new model and also using the historic FOR. Further, production costs and reliability for the ERCOT system under the regulated and deregulated environments were computed and compared. The results are discussed in detail.; The work reported here also addresses the ancillary service unbundling issue. In the restructured environment ancillary services may be unbundled from the basic energy service. Therefore, a proper pricing scheme needs to be devised to apportion the costs associated with providing these services to the end customers. A scheme for pricing voltage control/reactive power service as derived from the bulk power system is proposed. The pricing scheme proposed herein uses bus voltage sensitivity factors to allocate the costs associated with voltage control/reactive power supply service. |
