Reliability-based Economic Evaluation of Power Plant Equipment

Economic evaluation for power plant investments is indispensable, because the results determine whether the investment is worthwhile. The revenue of a power plant is highly dependent on the cost of production, the current price of electricity, the annual operating time, and the rated power of the facility. If a malfunction occurs in a piece of equipment which significantly affects the operation, it causes a major outage for the power plant, thus lowering the annual operating time and the total revenue of the facility. Therefore, while considering the installation of an equipment, an optimal state is needed to be found between investment cost, the efficiency of the plant and the reliability of various equipment. To include reliability in economic evaluation, a few different reliability assessment methods are presented. Then an economic evaluation method that has become widespread in practice will be presented. Then information based on reliability assessment will be used to compare the differences between cost components; therefore, it will be possible to integrate reliability into the economic evaluation.