The variance of production cost

A procedure to calculate the mean and the variance of energy production and its cost is outlined. The method uses the probability density function of hourly loads and machine outage representations. The results indicate that the variance of the cost is a very small percent of the mean. The method of modeling of the load has no effect on the mean of cost. However, the method of modeling the load has a great bearing on the value of the variance obtained. The effects of load modeling and the implicit assumptions regarding the outage characteristics of the machine on the variance of production cost are discussed.<
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