NORTH AMERICAN GENERATING UNIT OUTAGE DATA REPORTING SYSTEMS

Reliability evaluation is slowly moving from deterministic techniques to stochastic methods in order to recognize the probabilistic nature of the power system and its components. The application of probabilistic methods requires comprehensive data on the availability of system assets such as generating units and their constituent components. Generating unit operating and outage data have been collected for many years in North America. In Canada, these data are collected by the Canadian Electricity Association (CEA) in the Equipment Reliability Information System (ERIS) and in America they are collected by the North America Electrical Reliability Council (NERC) in the Generating Availability Data System (GADS). The generating unit operating and outage data system of the CEA ERIS is discussed in detail in this thesis. The unit unavailability indices are based on the data reporting procedures and the models embedded in them. The generating unit outage data reporting systems of CEA ERIS and NERC GADS are compared in this thesis. This comparison covers the generating unit states, state residence times and unavailability indices. The similarities and differences in these two systems are discussed in detail. This thesis describes and discusses a number of models including the conventional two-state model and three four-state models. The four-state model is an extension of the basic two-state model in order to incorporate the intermittent operating features of a peaking unit. An extended four-state model was developed in this research based on available CEA data on 93 gas turbine units. The unit unavailability indices for these peaking units are discussed and compared based on the two reporting systems and the different models. This thesis provides some recommendations to the CEA ERIS and NERC GADS regarding practical models for peaking unit unavailability index evaluation and peaking unit unavailability indices