6/27/2014 Availability factor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Availability factor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The availability factor of a power plant is the amount of time that it is able to produce electricity over a certain
period, divided by the amount of the time in the period. Occasions where only partial capacity is available may or
may not be deducted. Where they are, the metric is titled Equivalent Availability Factor (EAF). The Availability
Factor should not be confused with the capacity factor. The Capacity Factor for a period will always be less than
the Equivalent Availability Factor for the same period. The difference depends on the utilization of the power plant.
The availability of a power plant varies greatly depending on the type of fuel, the design of the plant and how the
plant is operated. Everything else being equal, plants that are run less frequently have higher availability factors
because they require less maintenance. Most thermal power stations, such as coal, geothermal and nuclear power
plants, have availability factors between 70% and 90%. Newer plants tend to have significantly higher availability
factors, but preventive maintenance is as important as improvements in design and technology. Gas turbines have
relatively high availability factors, ranging from 80% to 99%. Gas turbines are commonly used for peaking power
plants, co-generation plants and the first stage of combined cycle plants.
The availability factor of wind and solar power plants depends on weather periods when the plant is operational,
but there is no wind or sunlight, are counted as available, unavailable or disregarded. If they are counted as
available during these times, photovoltaic plants have an availability factor approaching or equal to 100%. Modern
wind turbines also have very high availability factors, about 98%. However, solar and wind plants have relatively
low capacity factors. In the wiki on capacity factors you can see that wind capacity factors range from 20-40% and
solar capacity factors in Arizona are about 19%. This makes wind and solar availability factors much lower if times
when sunlight or wind are not available are taken into account.
References
See also
Availability (Reliability Engineering)
Capacity factor
Generating Availability Data System (Electricity Industry)
List of energy storage projects
Utilization factor
Forced outage rate
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Categories: Power station technology
This page was last modified on 2 December 2013 at 20:22.
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