Combined-cycle power plants use two combustion turbines to produce electricity. Heat from the first turbine’s exhaust is captured to heat waterand produce steam sent to a second steam turbine that generates additional electricity. A 968-megawatt combined-cycle gas fired plant can be purchased for $450 million, has no salvage value, and produces a net cash flow(revenues less expenses) of $50 million per year over its expected 30-year life. Solve, a. If the hurdle rate (MARR) is 12% per year, how profitable an investment is this power plant? b. What is the simple payback period for the plant? Is this investment acceptable?

Combined-cycle power plants use two combustion turbines to produce electricity. Heat from the first turbine’s exhaust is captured to heat waterand produce steam sent to a second steam turbine that generates additional electricity. A 968-megawatt combined-cycle gas fired plant can be purchased for $450 million, has no salvage value, and produces a net cash flow(revenues less expenses) of $50 million per year over its expected 30-year life. Solve, a. If the hurdle rate (MARR) is 12% per year, how profitable an investment is this power plant? b. What is the simple payback period for the plant? Is this investment acceptable?

Practical Management Science

6th Edition

ISBN:9781337406659

Author:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Publisher:WINSTON, Wayne L.

Chapter2: Introduction To Spreadsheet Modeling

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 33P: Assume the demand for a companys drug Wozac during the current year is 50,000, and assume demand...

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Seas Beginning sells clothing by mail order. An important question is when to strike a customer from the companys mailing list. At present, the company strikes a customer from its mailing list if a customer fails to order from six consecutive catalogs. The company wants to know whether striking a customer from its list after a customer fails to order from four consecutive catalogs results in a higher profit per customer. The following data are available: If a customer placed an order the last time she received a catalog, then there is a 20% chance she will order from the next catalog. If a customer last placed an order one catalog ago, there is a 16% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order two catalogs ago, there is a 12% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order three catalogs ago, there is an 8% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order four catalogs ago, there is a 4% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. If a customer last placed an order five catalogs ago, there is a 2% chance she will order from the next catalog she receives. It costs 2 to send a catalog, and the average profit per order is 30. Assume a customer has just placed an order. To maximize expected profit per customer, would Seas Beginning make more money canceling such a customer after six nonorders or four nonorders?
It costs a pharmaceutical company 75,000 to produce a 1000-pound batch of a drug. The average yield from a batch is unknown but the best case is 90% yield (that is, 900 pounds of good drug will be produced), the most likely case is 85% yield, and the worst case is 70% yield. The annual demand for the drug is unknown, with the best case being 20,000 pounds, the most likely case 17,500 pounds, and the worst case 10,000 pounds. The drug sells for 125 per pound and leftover amounts of the drug can be sold for 30 per pound. To maximize annual expected profit, how many batches of the drug should the company produce? You can assume that it will produce the batches only once, before demand for the drug is known.
A common decision is whether a company should buy equipment and produce a product in house or outsource production to another company. If sales volume is high enough, then by producing in house, the savings on unit costs will cover the fixed cost of the equipment. Suppose a company must make such a decision for a four-year time horizon, given the following data. Use simulation to estimate the probability that producing in house is better than outsourcing. If the company outsources production, it will have to purchase the product from the manufacturer for 25 per unit. This unit cost will remain constant for the next four years. The company will sell the product for 42 per unit. This price will remain constant for the next four years. If the company produces the product in house, it must buy a 500,000 machine that is depreciated on a straight-line basis over four years, and its cost of production will be 9 per unit. This unit cost will remain constant for the next four years. The demand in year 1 has a worst case of 10,000 units, a most likely case of 14,000 units, and a best case of 16,000 units. The average annual growth in demand for years 2-4 has a worst case of 7%, a most likely case of 15%, and a best case of 20%. Whatever this annual growth is, it will be the same in each of the years. The tax rate is 35%. Cash flows are discounted at 8% per year.
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Assume the demand for a companys drug Wozac during the current year is 50,000, and assume demand will grow at 5% a year. If the company builds a plant that can produce x units of Wozac per year, it will cost 16x. Each unit of Wozac is sold for 3. Each unit of Wozac produced incurs a variable production cost of 0.20. It costs 0.40 per year to operate a unit of capacity. Determine how large a Wozac plant the company should build to maximize its expected profit over the next 10 years.
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The Tinkan Company produces one-pound cans for the Canadian salmon industry. Each year the salmon spawn during a 24-hour period and must be canned immediately. Tinkan has the following agreement with the salmon industry. The company can deliver as many cans as it chooses. Then the salmon are caught. For each can by which Tinkan falls short of the salmon industrys needs, the company pays the industry a 2 penalty. Cans cost Tinkan 1 to produce and are sold by Tinkan for 2 per can. If any cans are left over, they are returned to Tinkan and the company reimburses the industry 2 for each extra can. These extra cans are put in storage for next year. Each year a can is held in storage, a carrying cost equal to 20% of the cans production cost is incurred. It is well known that the number of salmon harvested during a year is strongly related to the number of salmon harvested the previous year. In fact, using past data, Tinkan estimates that the harvest size in year t, Ht (measured in the number of cans required), is related to the harvest size in the previous year, Ht1, by the equation Ht = Ht1et where et is normally distributed with mean 1.02 and standard deviation 0.10. Tinkan plans to use the following production strategy. For some value of x, it produces enough cans at the beginning of year t to bring its inventory up to x+Ht, where Ht is the predicted harvest size in year t. Then it delivers these cans to the salmon industry. For example, if it uses x = 100,000, the predicted harvest size is 500,000 cans, and 80,000 cans are already in inventory, then Tinkan produces and delivers 520,000 cans. Given that the harvest size for the previous year was 550,000 cans, use simulation to help Tinkan develop a production strategy that maximizes its expected profit over the next 20 years. Assume that the company begins year 1 with an initial inventory of 300,000 cans.
W. L. Brown, a direct marketer of womens clothing, must determine how many telephone operators to schedule during each part of the day. W. L. Brown estimates that the number of phone calls received each hour of a typical eight-hour shift can be described by the probability distribution in the file P10_33.xlsx. Each operator can handle 15 calls per hour and costs the company 20 per hour. Each phone call that is not handled is assumed to cost the company 6 in lost profit. Considering the options of employing 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 operators, use simulation to determine the number of operators that minimizes the expected hourly cost (labor costs plus lost profits).