POWER March 2011 - 74

BENCHMARKING
Benchmarking Fossil Plant
Performance Measures, Part I:
Station-Level Metrics
How does your company prepare and share fossil plant performance data?
What data are important, and how much effort is required to collect and
report the data? What are the most important statistics for reporting key
fossil plant operations? The latest EUCG benchmarking survey reveals
the favored fossil performance metrics at several of the largest utilities in
eight key categories.
By Charlene Foltzer, PSEG Power
A
number of important and proprietary
EUCG benchmarking surveys have
been summarized in POWER over
the past few years. Those articles, whose
information was derived from member surveys
conducted by the EUCG Fossil Productivity
Committee, covered boiler tube
The EUCG: Fostering
Industry Excellence
The EUCG is an association of electric utility
professionals that provides a forum in
which utilities can improve their operation
and maintenance practices and construction
performance. Founded in 1973, the EUCG
holds technical conferences and workshops
twice yearly for the purpose of information
exchange. The organization (formerly
known as the Electric Utility Cost Group)
is organized into committees and working
groups by interest area, such as fossil,
nuclear, and hydroelectric plants; transmission
and distribution; safety; and IT.
The EUCG's Fossil Productivity Committee
has 32 electric utility members from the
U.S. reporting operating data on more than
300 individual coal-fired units. That number
represents more than 30% of operating
coal plants in the U.S. The committee also
includes members from six other countries.
The spring 2011 EUCG meeting will be
held April 3-6 at the Marriott City Center
in Charlotte, N.C. For more information
about the EUCG, contact Pat Kovalesky,
executive director, at 623-572-4140, or
visit www.eucg.org.
74
failures (October 2009), the installed cost
of environmental equipment such as scrubbers
(July 2007, updated March 2009) and
selective catalytic reduction systems (February
2006), and various staffing issues
(maintenance staff in February 2008 and
plant engineering staff in August 2006).
All the EUCG benchmarking surveys reported
on by POWER can be found in the
online archives at www.powermag.com.
One of the EUCG's key goals is developing
process and market benchmarks, unit
reliability strategies, and best-practice applications
to foster performance and efficiency
within the power generation industry
(see sidebar). Although the topics of future
benchmarking surveys are selected by the
entire committee membership at each meeting,
details of the final survey data-suitable
for benchmarking any plant's performance
1. At what level in the company or organization are performance measures
used? Each of the 16 plants that participated in the survey collects data and produces
plant-level performance reports. However, not every plant uses the same metrics or the same
number of metrics. As this chart shows, the final performance data reports do not appear to be
uniformly passed down to plant departments, nor are they required by all fleet-level managers
or company-level executives. Source: ECUG
Large
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16
15
14
13
12
11
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
Corporate level Fossil fleet level
www.powermag.com
Generation
technology level
Plant/station
level
Plant/station
department level
POWER | March 2011
Medium
Small
Number of companies

http://www.powermag.com http://www.eucg.org http://www.powermag.com

POWER March 2011

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