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Traditionally, power plants are designed to fulfil a pre-specified external demand, usually by oversizing the existing equipment, which implies excessive capital costs and might even result in designs that cannot satisfy demands for certain situations. On the other hand, to avoid large economic penalties if power demand is not satisfied, the design and operation of such systems need to consider the effect of maintenance funds allocation on the equipment availability. In the present work, an MINLP model addresses the design and operation of power plants incorporating reliability restrictions and maintenance funds assignment considerations. Then, design and operative variables are optimized simultaneously throughout several maintenance and failure situations that configure different scenarios, in order to ensure that the plant will be able to cope with them while meeting process requirements at minimum cost. Furthermore, the proposed formulation is robust enough to tackle problems of the size and complexity commonly found in industry and has the potential of yielding significant economic savings, as shown throughout different case studies.