13. Reliability and Performance Indicators of Power Plants

The reliability of power plants is one of the parameters of the reliability of power systems. The power system includes a variety of power plants so each of the plants is presented by its reliability indicators. The need for several indicators for one plant arises from the fact that the plants under consideration are fairly complex facilities and they are a part of a very complex system, where only one indicator may not be sufficient. The presented indicators that are collected for distinguished power plants are not all comparable to each other. The reason for their incomparability lays in the fact that different groups of professionals deal with each of the plants and they do not invest the efforts in some unification of the terminology and methodology. The reliability and performance indicators include plant availability, unit capability factor, unplanned capability loss factor, safety accident rate, safety system performance, time availability factor, capacity factor or load factor, a forced outage rate, which is actually not a rate but availability, equivalent forced outage rate, and successful start-up rate.