Powerplant Productivity. Improvement Study: current practices in Illinois utilities towards powerplant productivity. Final report, Project 1, Task 1

Technical Report · Thu Apr 05 00:00:00 EST 1979

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/5411849· OSTI ID:5411849

Efforts of this task indicate that powerplant productivity is a complex issue that has to take into account economic factors, equipment limitations, and system-loading characteristics as well as external constraints such as regulatory requirements. Among the specific findings are: (1) utilities in Illinois use the industry-wide measures of performance such as capacity factor, availability factor, forced outage rates etc.; equivalent availability as a measure is not in common practice; (2) several unit performance statistics are collected on a routine basis such as the daily unit status, component outage data, monthly production figures etc.; (3) identifying major causes of lost productivity appears to be a relatively simple task, but finding economically and technically acceptable corrective actions are generally more difficult; (4) selection of improvement projects, as well as evaluating their future impacts, is mostly based on operating experience and engineering judgement, with no use of formal analytical/statistical models; (5) there generally is a group in every utility - typically called the power production department - with routine responsibilities for upkeep of unit productivity; and (6) recently the Commonwealth Edison Co. has developed a procedure for utilizing the Edison Electric Institute outage data base for analyzing productivity-related questions at nuclear plants; this procedure utilizes unit nonoperating hours to measure productivity.

• Research Organization: Illinois Commerce Commission, Springfield (USA)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: FC01-77RG08138
• OSTI ID: 5411849
• Report Number(s): CONS-8138-T5
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING
POLICY AND ECONOMY
20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS
ILLINOIS
POWER PLANTS
PRODUCTIVITY
CAPACITY
DATA ACQUISITION
ECONOMIC IMPACT
PERFORMANCE
GREAT LAKES REGION
NORTH AMERICA
USA
296001* - Energy Planning & Policy- Electric Power Generation- (-1989)
200106 - Fossil-Fueled Power Plants- Economics