Introducing reliability applications for scheduled outages in Costa Rica using Monte Carlo methods

Even if every forced outage in power plants is well documented in the Costa Rican electrical network, the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE) - a government-owned public utility- does not integrate any reliability adequacy indices in the annual maintenance program for power plants. Currently, the adoption of reliability centered maintenance (RCM) programs is common industry practice to optimize operation and maintenance costs. Therefore, this paper introduces, for the first time in the Costa Rican electrical network, the use of reliability adequacy indices based on non-sequential Monte Carlo simulation tools for the optimization of the power plants' annual maintenance program.