Outage Performance Improvement by Preventive Maintenance Optimization

Shutting down a power plant for any reason is a costly process. Loss of production revenues from one unit can exceed millions of dollars per day. It is therefore good practice to keep outages as short and efficient as possible. A major component of planned outages is Preventive Maintenance (PM). It is important that PM be applied only where needed. Unnecessary PM is costly, not only in terms of labor and material costs, but in additional lost time and production. Further, there are cases where PM is contraindicated by standard reliability models, i.e. components with decreasing failure rates. This can paradoxically introduce failures, incurring additional repair costs and production loss. The risk management group at the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station (STPEGS) has successfully developed software to optimize PM schedules by minimizing total costs and risks associated with corrective maintenance (CM) and PM. The optimum PM interval is determined as a multiple of outage cycles. Components are evaluated based on maintenance type, risk ranking, cost of performing CM at power, and regulatory or internal commitments. This information provided to systems engineering assists in determining whether to advance PM from an upcoming outage, or defer PM to a subsequent outage. Components with maintenance that can be performed online are outside of the scope of this paper and are not considered here.