Reliability, availability, and maintainability of utility and industrial cogeneration power plants

Statistics on the reliability, availability, and maintainability performance of electric power plants indicate that industrial cogeneration plants perform significantly better than their utility-owned sister plants. The factor reported to underlie this conclusion appear to be the same as those found in studies of utility plant performance. Among these factors are the relative economic importance of the plants; the degree to which the design can accommodate operations and maintenance needs; the planning and allocation of resources for plant maintenance; and personnel training. It is concluded that a wide variety of actions, in addition to new technology, can be incorporated into the design to reduce significantly the frequency and duration of plant outages, e.g. design for mission, maintainability, and reliability. The maintenance program can be enhanced by giving adequate consideration to outage planning and scheduling (e.g. advance part procurement, equipment tagout during cooldown); staff training (e.g. involvement of mechanics in design phase); and logistics support (e.g. spare parts management and acquisition of qualified maintenance personnel).<>