Substation Availability Factor (Industry trends) 1

[tintin75]

Greetings!
I note most substation availability figures come in at around 98-99%

QUESTIONS
What would be typical Availability targets written into OM contracts for various substation types/uses? (primary interest in renewable energy substations both MV and HV)

Bonus/Malus incentives - by my logic it looks sensible to penalise response delay for faults and reward meeting availability targets.
I just wonder if there are industry trends like a percentage of the yearly contract fee for bonuses.

CONTEXT, I am managing OM contracts on three wind-farm transmission substations and there is a clause that sets a target availability at ~98% but there are no financial incentives. My contractors are not performing and for a fourth project, I want to tighten up this part of the contract.

 

[JJ_Roy]

We've done something similar on a couple of projects. The calculations were based on lost MWh capacity using 98% availability over a rolling average period (6 months for the 3 yr contracts). So if they met 98% availability of the month they were paid 100% of the monthly contract price. If they had 100% availability for the month the contractor was paid something like 105% of the monthly contract price. If there was low availability it was based on the actual month MWh capacity / calculated 98% month capacity based on a rolling average. There was a 75% floor to the monthly contract price so the contractor would never be paid less than 75% of the monthly contract price.

We used the rolling average to smooth things out so if they had a really bad month it was not an immediate hit to their wallet and they could also make it up with some good 'availability' months as well. The rolling average gave them incentive knowing that they could catch-up. There was also a bunch of availability carve-outs for things out of the contractor's control (i.e. interconnecting utility issues, planned maintenance outages, catastrophic events, etc.).