Abstract
O&M costs have traditionally been introduced in unit commitment problems by means of an energy cost adder component. We argue that in the new context characterized by a large penetration of intermittent renewables this conventional modeling approach does not serve to reflect the impact that actual CCGTs O&M contracts may have on the electric power system economic dispatch. In the first part of this two-part paper, after qualitatively analyzing these contracts, we develop a formulation that allows including them in the traditional unit commitment optimization problem as a set of linear constraints. This formulation is used later on in Part II with the objective of analyzing and characterizing the major changes that properly considering these contracts introduce in the unit commitment problem results.
