Availability of fossil-fired steam power plants. [600 MW and larger]
Fossil-fired power plants of 600 MW or larger constitute a major proportion of the baseload capacity in the country but have the poorest availability record of any size category. Two primary aims of the EPRI Fossil Plant Performance and Reliability Program are short-term improvement of existing plant reliability, and initiation of work to eliminate current deficiencies in future plants. To define the problems and develop a strategy for improving the availability of over-600 MW fossil-fired plants, the statistics compiled by the EEI have been analyzed, and the resulting conclusions have been supplemented by meeting with utilities which operate power plants in that category. The annual availability reports published by the Edison Electric Institute are based on statistics which aggregate the outage hours from specific failure causes or problem areas. By assigning costs to outages ($4000/hour for forced outages, $1000/hour for scheduled ones), the relative importance of various problem areas has been determined. Boiler tube failures (water tubes, superheater tubes), turbine blade failures, condenser problems, and boiler-feed pump and drive problems have the highest cost impact among the 24 problem areas identified as either ''high cost'' (over $15 million annually) or ''moderately high cost'' ($5 to $15 million annually) calculated according to the approach previously described. To supplement the EEI data, six regional meetings were held by EPRI with utility representatives directly concerned with operating fossil plants of over 600 MW. The informal discussions generally confirmed the relative importance of the problem areas, and provided valuable information on the causes and relationships between problems which statistics alone could not provide.
- Research Organization:
- Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (USA)
- OSTI ID:
- 7300705
- Report Number(s):
- EPRI-FP-422SR
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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