Power plant cycling measure - Evaluating historical cycling to model future grid operations

Increasing penetration of wind and solar power will impact the operations of conventional generation on the power grid. Increased cycling - on/off as well as load following, and ramping will result in increased capital, operations and maintenance cost on existing assets. Recent renewable integration studies have included this incremental power plant cycling cost in their analysis to quantify the cost impacts of cycling and ramping of fossil-fueled generation. This refinement to the assessments of wind and solar impacts on the power system is important, however a gap exists in understanding how these costs should be applied to individual power plants. This analysis provides a guideline to develop standard measures to quantify past cycling of power plants, particularly coal and gas fired units. The authors present Equivalent Hot Starts (EHS) and Equivalent Operating Hours (EOH) as two factors that can be used to gauge power plant cycling.