A Probabilistic Power Flow Algorithm (PPF) allows the practical evaluation of the probability of occurrence of power system events, based on their historical performance, load forecast and availability of generating units and transmission equipment. Such events are overlads, undervoltages, overvoltages and indufficiency of active/reactive power generation. The probabilities or risks associated to these events are adequacy measures, or indices, linking loads, available equipment and operational policies. The practical PPF formulations available in literature present two main drawbacks. The first one is related with the computational difficulty in simultaneously obtaining all basic adequacy indices, within an efficient computational scheme. The second is related with the accuracy of calculated reactive figures, even in the case of modest uncertainty levels. In this work, a new, simple and efficient PPF algorithm, which alleviates the previous drawbacks, is proposed. Several practical applications of the proposed PPF algorithm are described as well as methodologies for its use in operational and expansion planning. Also, the similarities between PPF and composite reliability evaluation algorithms are emphasized. The application of PPF methods, providing additional information to the conventional deterministic approaches, has shown to be a very important auxiliary tool in the decision making process, thus contributing for the broad use of probabilistic methods.