Since early in its history, the power generation industry had been collecting unit and equipment outage data. Up until 1982, many individual and unique data collection systems had been developed with little, if any, coordination between utilities. Finally, in 1982, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) officially implemented the Generating Availability Data System (GADS).

Today, the NERC GADS program is recognized as the standard for the power generation industry with respect to unit availability and outage data reporting and tracking. More than 170 U.S. generating companies, as well as certain Canadian utilities, report data using the GADS Program.

GADS provides the electric utility industry with a comprehensive and flexible generating unit and equipment availability database. This database has assisted power generators, manufacturers, constructors, and regulators in considering programs aimed toward improving availability.

Program participants represent over 91% of the installed capacity of North America and more companies are entering the program each year. These 400 plus units are operated by private, cooperative, public, and federal utilities. By allowing all segments of the industry to participate and access this information, GADS has eliminated the need for similar data collection efforts by manufacturers, agencies of government, and others.

The MicroGADS software strictly follows the NERC standards for GADS data reporting and analysis to ensure consistency in the industry and to facilitate meaningful statistics and reports.

The written source for this consistency at NERC and with MicroGADS is the NERC Data Reporting Instructions manual. You can get a copy of this manual downloaded in electronic form by choosing the link above (file is in Adobe Acrobat format.)

If you would like to know more about NERC GADS Services, go to www.nerc.com