Power Plant Performance Assessments

One of the best ways to establish a realistic best-achievable benchmark for the performance of your plant is to conduct a Performance Assessment. A plant can typically see an immediate heat rate improvement of $1 million/ year or a 50 Btu/kWh decrease just from the controllable losses improvements brought forth from the Assessment. The Assessment can bring forward non-controllable losses' heat rate improvement suggestions. One Plant Assessment found $1.2 million a year or a 500 Btu/kWh decrease in heat rate opportunity from the review.

Another assessment found a 1.5% improvement in heat rate resulting from improvement areas identified during the Performance Assessment, which corresponds to a savings of almost $800,000 annually for a typical 500 Mw generating unit.

The primary objective of a Performance Assessment is to develop a current, best achievable, Unit model and provide solutions to improve your plant performance, thus decreasing heat rate.

The results in the Performance Assessment report will allow you to put our findings immediately into action. In the report, we include a comprehensive plan for applying the Performance Assessment results, and we also include an optimization-related prioritized list of potential improvements.

We just don't leave you hanging after the Performance Assessment is complete. PCS is also available to assist you with the implementation of any targeted heat rate program improvements you with to implement.

The Performance Assessment Process Includes:

• Quantifying Heat Rate Losses
• Controllable
• Non-controllable
• Benchmarking Unit Performance
• Determining Unit Performance
• Reviewing Instrumentation Programs
• Review Operating Practices
• Review Existing Performance Monitoring Tools and Methods
• Observing overall Plant culture relative to Heat Rate

Through utilization of our calibrated test instrumentation we can determine the actual efficiency of your plant. We will show Plant personnel what to look for when you want to do the most good with regard to heat rate. Our focus is to hone in on the parameters that have the biggest impact on heat rate and efficiency, while searching for all optimization improvements at your plant.

To see how PCS can help you with a performance assessment at your plant, contact us at 970-240-4381 or e-mail Performance Consulting Services.