Risk Analysis of Power-Gen Gas Turbines With GADS Outage Data

According to FM Global proprietary data, power-gen gas turbine losses have consistently represented a dominant share of the overall equipment-based loss value over the past decade. Effective assessment of loss exposure or risk related to gas turbines has become and will continue to be a critical but challenging task for property insurers and their clients. Such systematic gas turbine risk assessment is a necessary step to develop strategies for turbine risk mitigation and loss prevention. This paper presents a study of outage data from the Generating Availability Data System (GADS) by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC). The risk of forced outages in turbines was evaluated in terms of outage days and number of outages per unit-year. In order to understand the drivers of the forced outages, the influence of variables including turbine age, capacity, type, loading characteristic, and event cause codes were analyzed by grouping the outage events based on the chosen values (or ranges of values) of these variables. A list of major findings related to the effect of these variables on the risk of forced outage is discussed.