Powerplant productivity improvement study: demonstration of the DOE/MRI methodology. Final report

Abstract

A methodology, distributed by DOE, may be used as a potential tool for the utility industry to assess and evaluate productivity and reliability problems of existing and future units. The model can be used to assess the impact of an improvement project or corrective action on unit productivity parameters such as heat rate, capacity factor, availability, or equivalent availability. The methodology analyzes: the effect of component redundancy on unit equivalent availability; the effect of component reliability on unit equivalent availability; and a component's outage trend to project the component's future outage rate. The first purpose of this study is to illustrate for the utilities how to apply the methodology. Thus, this report contains the analysis performed by applying the methodology at three units of Illinois power plants. The units evaluated were Wood River 5, Quad Cities 1, and Quad Cities 2. A total of 8 improvement projects were evaluated and all outage data and equations used are included in order to facilitate utility reproduction of the given results. The second purpose is to evaluate the methodology as a useful tool for individual utilities; a number of modifications are suggested.