POWER February 2022 - 30

OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE
Four Key Allies for Keeping
Powerhouses in Top Condition
Today, power generators often don't have the same in-house capabilities that they
did in years past. Therefore, managing operations and maintenance at many facilities
has become more difficult. Here are some ways to ease the burden.
Steven Rakvica
G
lobal demand for electrical power
is set to surge in 2022, driven by a
rebound in demand suppressed by
the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as fastgrowing
sales of electric vehicles. But
are today's powerhouses up to the task?
Can they deliver the power required-
particularly in a world in which there's
more and more concern about how that
power is generated?
In our experience as engineers, keeping
up will be difficult-but the right approach
can go a long way. To start with,
it's important to understand some of the
recent changes in the ways powerhouses
operate since the 1990s.
Fewer Skilled Staff. Most plants used
to have a plant manager, an operations
manager, a maintenance manager, plus
a whole engineering department so they
could do their own projects. Now, there
are fewer staff in total, and they tend to
have less education and experience.
Fewer On-hand Resources. In the
1990s, it was common to find even midsize
and smaller powerhouses equipped
with a complete parts room where spare
bearings, gaskets, fasteners, raw stock
for welding repairs, and other necessities
were stored. Power stations had
maintenance shops and machine shops.
Many of those rooms are empty now.
Newer plants are being built without any
of those facilities beyond the minimum.
Shorter (or No) Annual Outages.
Shutdowns for service and maintenance
for large powerhouses would previously
last four to six weeks, enough to do a
thorough job of putting the whole facility
into good shape. Those outages have become
shorter-two weeks in duration,
or maybe just one. Smaller places get
by with no scheduled shutdowns at all.
It's become more of a culture in which
equipment is used until it fails or efficiency
degrades significantly, and then situations
are handled as emergency repairs.
These three trends are making it
difficult for powerhouses to go on
30
1. Adding sensors to equipment, such as a plant fan located in a hard-to-access area, and connecting
devices to the control room can make it easier to catch problems before components
fail. Courtesy: Encorus Group
meeting demand. To help with this,
powerhouse operators have four main
sources of skills and resources. Getting
the most out of each depends on understanding
the role of each, and how
they work together.
Give Employees the Information
Needed to Do Their Work
As we've noted, today's staffs are leaner-some
smaller houses get by with a
plant manager and no supporting managers,
just some control room operators.
Power generation companies can help
with this by empowering employees
with information. Adding sensory devices,
connected to the control room, can
alert staff when there's a problem-excessive
vibration in a fan (Figure 1), for
example, may indicate that it's coming
loose from its mounts or there's a problem
with the bearings.
Previous generations of technology
had relatively limited diagnostic abilities,
and interpreting the results required
significant experience. Connecting diagnostic
equipment to the control room
required a big master distributed control
system, and lots of programming. Now,
it's easy to connect a sensor remotely
to a human-machine interface (HMI) to
provide detailed feedback on how a machine
is running. It's easy to set upper
www.powermag.com
and lower limits on many parameters,
and alerts can be sent to the mobile
phones of the plant management team
so that they know, even off premises, if
there's a problem.
Diagnostic information can be tracked,
and trends noted-such as gradually increasing
power consumption on a pump
that might indicate that a pipe system
such as a heat exchanger is becoming
fouled. All these points help multiply
the effectiveness of existing staff, giving
them the information they need-
alerting them to problems and providing
some recommendations on what to do
about those situations.
Working with Vendors, the Right Way
Vendors can be a great help for powerhouse
managers seeking to provide reliable,
low-cost power, but they have to be
approached the right way. The more specific
you can be concerning your problem
and the more detailed your specifications
are, the better the vendor will be at
providing an appropriate solution.
You can also provide vendors with
outcomes you're trying to achieve-
such as explaining that you want better
control of the ramp-up speed for a motor,
rather than simply an on-off control.
This might mean you need a variable
frequency drive, so your discussion with
POWER | February 2022
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POWER February 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER February 2022

POWER February 2022 - Intro
POWER February 2022 - Cover1
POWER February 2022 - Cover2
POWER February 2022 - 1
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POWER February 2022 - Cover3
POWER February 2022 - Cover4
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