COMPUTATION OF EQUIVALENT LOAD DURATION CURVES USING MIXTURE OF NORMALS DISTRIBUTIONS.

For applications such as capacity expansion planning and screening of alternative expansion plans, there is a need for a fast, accurate, robust, and reliable method to approximate the equivalent load duration curves (e. l. d. c. ) in the production costing studies. We have developed a new approximation technique based on mixtures of normals distributions. The mixtures of normals approximation (m. o. n. a. ) for the representation of e. l. d. c. 's use the properties of mixtures of normals distributions. The technique consists of the approximation of the system load random variable by a mixture of normals distribution, the approximation of the outage random variable of a group of one or more units by a mixture of normals distribution, and the combination of these two approximations to obtain a m. o. n. a. of each e. l. d. c.