Emissions dispatch under the underutilization provision of the 1990 US Clean Air Act Amendments: models and analysis

Pending US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) regulations concerning the use of Phase I generating units have the potential to significantly affect dispatch decisions and costs. Practical methods for estimating production costs and for real-time dispatch that would incorporate regulatory constraints upon the output of all Phase I units in a generating system are proposed. These approaches are based on assigning a bonus, in $/MBtu, to fuel use by those units. As a demonstration, a probabilistic production costing model is used to assess the impact of two alternative proposals concerning the definition of underutilization.>