Maintenance optimization of power systems with renewable energy sources integrated.

This paper proposes a quantitative maintenance optimization problem for developing reliability centred maintenance for a power system with renewable energy sources. Reliability and cost are two important interlinked aspects considered by system operators in many deregulated power systems. Reliability centred maintenance is an effective method to consider both of these aspects when performing the maintenance optimization. Nevertheless, this method has not adequately studied for a power system with renewable energy sources included. According to the maintenance optimization problem proposed in this paper, first, the most critical components of the system are selected. Then, a set of maintenance strategies are proposed for all critical components. After that, the total cost of each maintenance strategy for all critical components are calculated as the summation of operation, maintenance, environmental, and interruption costs. Finally, the best maintenance strategy for each critical component is selected by identifying the lowest total cost of different maintenance strategies. The proposed method is tested on IEEE 14-bus system. The results show that the proposed maintenance optimization method provides a useful way for deciding the most proper maintenance strategies for the studied system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]