Estimating Long Term Major Maintenance and Capital Spending Requirements of Trinidad’s Aging Power Plants

This paper describes the process used by the Power Generation Company of Trinidad and Tobago (PowerGen) to estimate the range of major (expenditures greater than US$50,000) recurring and non-recurring costs that can be expected to be incurred from 2006–2025 by PowerGen’s three existing generating facilities: Port of Spain, Point Lisas and Penal. Since many of these Capital and O&M costs are not 100% certain, a probabilistic approach was used that incorporates a Monte Carlo methodology. The results of this approach allowed PowerGen to better understand the range of possible major capital and O&M expenditures that would likely be required over the next 20 years along with a quantification of the risk profile of those ranges. By adding these costs to the routine O&M costs, a total cost cash flow timeline was able to be developed that more realistically forecast the actual financial requirements of PowerGen’s power plants. Periodic review and updates of the data will also provide PowerGen with a continuing sound basis for long term technical and financial decisions. Additionally, a benchmarking analysis was performed that compared the reliability trends of similar but older technologies to those plants in PowerGen’s fleet in order to gain an insight into the reliability expectations for PowerGen plants over the next twenty years.