Are reliability measures unreliable? [Power Generation]

For several years the term commercial availability (CA) has become increasingly used as the primary reliability metric of generating plants, replacing such traditional measures such as equivalent availability and equivalent forced outage rate. This is because CA more closely relates the plant´s performance to its effect on the company´s cost (or profitability). However, there have been certain unexpected consequences as a result. This paper describes some of the implications resulting from the adoption of CA