From 18 Forced Outages to Zero Missed Starts: How CPS Energy’s Arthur von Rosenberg Plant Rebuilt Its Reliability
View allA deliberate shift from reactive maintenance to a reliability-centered operating culture cut the 500-MW combined cycle plant’s forced outage rate by 90%—and delivered perfect availability through Texas’s most demanding months.
On Aug. 29, 2025, CPS Energy’s system hit a peak demand of 5,674 MW—the kind of summer stress test that Texas grid operators plan around all year. For the Arthur von Rosenberg (AvR) Power Plant, a 500-MW gas-fired combined cycle facility in Elmendorf, Texas, the day was unremarkable in the best possible way. The plant was available, as it was through every critical month of 2025—every winter cold snap, every summer scorcher, every dispatch call from the grid. AvR finished the year with 100% starting reliability and a 100% Equivalent Availability Factor (EAF) across the seven months CPS Energy designates as most critical to grid reliability.
Two years earlier, that outcome would have seemed out of reach. The plant was posting an Equivalent Forced Outage Rate (EFOR) of 5.8% and averaging 18 forced outages a year—a level of unplanned downtime that, according to the utility’s account, meant even small equipment issues could cascade into lost generation, operational stress, and eroded market competitiveness. The turnaround that followed is why the plant is being recognized as a POWER Top Plant finalist. Not because CPS Energy built something new, but because it fundamentally changed how it ran something it already had. In a market where new dispatchable capacity is expensive and slow to procure, AvR’s transformation is a case study in extracting more reliable megawatts from existing equipment—through data, discipline, and culture rather than capital-intensive additions.