Know How to Maximize Maintenance Spending

摘要

Fossil-fired generation facility owners have always struggled to find the best balance between maintenance expenditures and plant availability. Consider first the elements of maintenance cost. For the purposes of this conceptual discussion, reactive maintenance is defined as actions or efforts taken as the result of unplanned outages or durations. Proactive maintenance is defined as preventive actions aimed at the source of potential failures to extend the life of the equipment and avoid failures. To bring the analysis from a conceptual discussion to an empirical application, Solomon considered a set of 30 generating units that burned PRB coal. Maintenance costs and Solomon's Maintenance Index from the CPA were used for this work. The rest of this work are significant in that the conceptual relationship between maintenance spending and availability has been quantified such that an optimum point can be determined. Moreover, the authors have demonstrated a methodology to identify a long-term operational target for a specific generating unit.