What is plant factor in a power plant?

Answer 1

Plant Factor (The net capacity factor of a power plant ) -- To calculate the capacity factor, take the total amount of energy the plant produced during a period of time and divide by the amount of energy the plant would have produced at full capacity. Capacity factors vary greatly depending on the type of fuel that is used and the design of the plant.

A base load power plant with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts (MW) might produce 648,000 megawatt-hours (MW·h) in a 30-day month. The capacity factor is 0.9 or 90%.

The Burton Wold Wind Farm consists of ten Enercon E70-E4 wind turbines@ 2 MW nameplate capacity for a total installed capacity of 20 MW.[2] In 2008 the wind farm generated 43,416 MW·h of electricity. (Note 2008 was a leap year.) The capacity factor for this wind farm in 2008 was just under 25%

Reasons for reduced capacity factor

due to equipment failures or routine maintenance

output is curtailed because the electricity is not needed or because the price of electricity is too low to make production economical.

This accounts for most of the unused capacity of peaking power plants.

Peaking plants may operate for only a few hours per year or up to several hours per day. Their electricity is relatively expensive. It is uneconomical, even wasteful, to make a peaking power plant as efficient as a base load plant because they do not operate enough to pay for the extra equipment cost, and perhaps not enough to offset the embodied energy of the additional components.

A third reason is a variation on the second: the operators of a hydroelectric dam may uprate its nameplate capacity by adding more generator units. Since the supply of fuel (i.e. water) remains unchanged, the uprated dam obtains a higher peak output in exchange for a lower capacity factor.

Because hydro plants are highly dispatchable, they are able to act as load following power plants. Having a higher peak capacity allows a dam's operators to sell more of the annual output of electricity during the hours of highest electricity demand (and thus the highest spot price). In practical terms, uprating a dam allows it tobalance a larger amount of intermittent energy sources on the grid such aswind farms and solar power plants, and to compensate for unscheduled shutdowns of baseload power plants, or brief surges in demand for electricity.....

With best regards,

Janybek Omorov

Answer 2

The plant factor in a power plant is the ratio of actual energy output to the maximum potential energy output over a specific period of time. It indicates how efficiently the power plant is operating and is used to evaluate its performance. A higher plant factor means the plant is operating closer to its maximum capacity.