Idle Equipment and Suboptimal Unit Utilization During Dispatch

$1.2M - $4.8M annually (2-4% fuel budget variance written off as operational cost; no mechanism to recover) • $1.2M - $4.8M annually (2-4% fuel efficiency loss on typical 500MW plant with $200M annual fuel budget) • $1.5M - $6M annually (hedging premiums paid due to uncertainty; opportunity cost on over-hedged positions; mark-to-market losses)

Compare actual fuel spend to budget; investigate large variances in monthly close; tag to 'operational inefficiency' without root-cause dispatch analysis; accept as 'uncontrollable' • Compliance managers extract emissions and generation data into spreadsheets to compute average rates after the fact, then issue manual guidance on preferred unit usage for future periods. • Engineers maintain offline performance maps and spreadsheet-based models to estimate heat rate and preferred operating regions, then informally advise operations rather than feeding a live optimizer.