Making power plants(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_station) reliable is not just a technical goal; it is a business imperative. Executives are thinking about reliability along with safety, costs, and the environmental concerns because the grid is leveraging assets that need to perform every hour of every day.
Engineering Services provide adequate utilities the tools, data, and judgment necessary to achieve that reliability standard without breaking their budgets.
The Importance of System Reliability
Customers of the grid expect reliable electricity consumption in heat waves, storms, and busy parts of the daily cycle. Even brief outages not only come with penalties in some cases, but they also lead to lost revenue, and once there is a loss of trust that can further impact economics of future outages. Therefore, reliability is both a metric of operations, as well as a value proposition. Regulators and stakeholders are increasingly tying incentives (for local tariffs) and penalties (for penalties) to demonstrated measurable reliability.
Engineering services contribute to that value proposition by linking the health of the asset to what is needed to be dispatched. They drive factors of condition of the equipment into factors of risk, and from risk into a plan. Clear priorities identified by Engineering Services allow for the decision of where to place investment, when to repair failure, and when to potentially schedule a repair for the least system impact.
Engineering Solutions for Turbine Health
At the heart of many fleets are the steam turbines (see here for more). The health of the steam turbines can determine the outcome for both amount and efficiency. Proven solutions in Engineering Services relate data, experience in the field, and maintenance to protect that region of the fleet.
Utilities are often engaged in conditions monitoring on their steam turbines, keeping track of bearing temperatures, valve performance and casing expansion. When trends drift, targeted vibration data can help to identify sources of failure before wear becomes a trip event. These contributions reinforce operational practices about facilitating margin sustainability and service life extension:
- Alignment and balancing programs, specific to reducing loading stress on bearings and blades.
- Lubrication system updates to stabilize film strength and minimize varnish prevalence across the population.
- Flow-path renewals that enhance performance and do not impact remaining life of aging components.
- Controls tuning and trip logic checking, leading to start reliability improvement and reducing unneeded nuisance trips.
All these actions aimed at converting all ancillary monitoring data as useful information to real mega-watts and avoided trips.
Role of Inspections in Grid Stability
Quality of inspections will influence the level of confidence a utility has running the hard during peak demand. Visual inspections will find glaring wear items, but inspections more of value will go beyond visual. A borescope inspection will find pits, cracks or deposits on blades and nozzles, facilitating a defined repair, while keeping the capacity online without an unplanned outage. Surface-breaking defects in rotors and key bolting and fastening will be evaluated using magnetic particle inspections, rapidly identifying defects and indications all within a short duration of outage.
When the inspection evidence is coupled to the operating history of intervals, engineers can project remaining life and outline action points. In this you have an inspection shifted from a compliance activity into a reliable lever of evidence that produced decisions to minimize trips across the fleet. When all the inspection data is compiled, you have the ability to standardize and remove the variance or rightsizing regionally or fleet-wide behavior.
Risk Reduction Through Proactive Planning
Executives do not manage equipment risk, they manage uncertainty. Proactive planning synthesizes and manages that uncertainty to prepare for the next peak season. After each event, an anomaly structured root cause analysis will collect and document the What, why, and how to prevent it from happening again. That will flow into documented actionably real choice plans at each plant location and at the boardroom level as part of the enterprise’s visibility plans.
Some examples of what part of a sustainable plan will be include:
- A risk register that ranks the units and associated components by criticality and consequence.
- Outage playbook templates of scoping, hold points and acceptance criteria that correspond to the reliability outcomes.
- Spare parts and repair strategies to limit long cycle lead-time availability.
- Parts and vendor oversight incoming parts inspection to limit surprises with quality.
- Scenario drills for extreme weather, fuel constraints, and high cycling demands.
Building a Sustainable Energy Future
Reliability and sustainability are not opposing forces but flow off of each other towards reliability and sustainability outcomes. A healthy functional turbine will cycle in a less severe fashion and smoother with variable renewables, improve fuel burn and emissions stability. A decarbonized fleet will provide flexible firm support of renewable generation with unnecessary fuel burn.
With engineering service to utilities assists in focused conversations about asset service extensions; better planning for unplanned outages; and investing in the highest-risk unit based on evidence of advantage. Actionable data, disciplined inspections, and managing planned risk allows the organization leadership to provide reliable power service today and ready the fleet to tomorrow. Publicly available engineering standards can produce an opportunity to reliably and sustainably engineer assets can be used as a visible demonstration of public responsibilities that reliability and climate expectations can only progress towards in the horizon.
