A comparison of North American Generating Unit Outage parameters and unavailability indices

This paper presents a detailed comparison between two generating unit outage data reporting systems. These are the generating availability data system (GADS) maintained by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) and the Equipment Reliability Information System (ERIS) created by the Canadian Electricity Association (CEA). The definitions of the generating unit states and residence times in the two systems are presented and compared multi-state models which extend the conventional two state model are included and compared for peaking units. Equivalent derating concepts are also utilized to represent derated state conditions. The CEA ERIS peaking unit database is utilized to calculate the relevant indices.