Environmental regulations alter resource planning methodology
- Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power, CA (United States)
The advent of regulations governing the volume of air pollutants emitted may force radical alterations in traditional economics-based resource planning. A review of the effect on regional resource planning of adopted emission rules for the Los Angeles basin may benefit utility resource planners. The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act (Amendments) concerning utility generation has prompted a reassessment of resource planning methodology. The current methodology does not account for the restrictive NOx emission limits imposed by the Amendments. A new procedure needs to be developed that considers environmental impacts in the selection of the most economical resource plan. Historically, economic aspects of dispatch and generation has dominated the focus of resource planners; for most of the larger utilities, resource planning usually entailed performing analyses with convolution-based production costing software. This method is used because it resolves the prohibitively large run times associated with the exhaustively comprehensive enumeration method of matching loads with resources. An alternative method of analysis, Monte Carlo, requires a larger number of iterations to achieve the precision of convolution. Additionally, the Monte Carlo method`s of convergence, as compared to the convolution method, is much more sensitive to the number of operating units, the number of operating states, the range of input data, and the convergence criteria.
- OSTI ID:
- 495422
- Journal Information:
- Environmental Solutions, Vol. 10, Issue 4; Other Information: PBD: May-Jun 1997
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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