Prediction of lacking control power in power plants using statistical methods

Prediction of the performance of plants like power plants is of interest, since the plant operator can use these predictions to optimize the plant production. In this paper the focus is addressed on a special case where a combination of high coal moisture content and a high load limits the possible plant load, meaning that the requested plant load cannot be met. The available models are in this case uncertain. Instead statistical methods are used to predict upper and lower uncertainty bounds on the prediction. Two different methods are used. The first relies on statistics of recent prediction errors; the second uses operating point depending statistics of prediction errors. Using these methods on the previous mentioned case, it can be concluded that the second method can be used to predict the power plant performance, while the first method has problems predicting the uncertain performance of the plant.