POWER March 2011 - 71

PLANT MANAGEMENT
Who Needs an Owner's Engineer?
In the past, members of a utility's engineering staff spent their career designing
and building new power plants. Today, many utility engineers find that
opportunity comes around only once in a career. To fill the experience
gap, an " owner's engineer " company can add to a utility's team a cadre
of highly qualified power engineers who focus on avoiding design errors
and keeping the project on schedule.
By James Connell and Dennis Grennan, HDR Engineering
I
t is a truism of the power generation industry
that-despite calls for energy conservation,
efficiency improvements, and increased use
of renewable energy-the appetite for power
will continue to grow as our economy rebounds
and expands. The result is that, whether or not
consumers publicly endorse them, there is a
corresponding need for more power plants,
either to address increases in electrical demand
or to replace retired capacity. That need
is stoked by ever-tighter environmental regulations
driving cleaner power production and
the never-ending search for innovative ways to
generate, store, and move power.
None of this comes free. With price fluctuations
and increases for the basic raw materials
that go into a power plant, such as copper
and nickel, the cost to build a full-scale coalor
natural gas-fired power plant can easily
top a billion dollars today.
And none of this comes easily. Plans
developed over many years can end up
cancelled when the stubborn obstacles of approval
or financing become insurmountable,
leaving both plant owners and consumers in
a tough spot. Even in the best-case scenarios,
the maze of complex and interrelated tasks
required to take a project from concept to
start-up can seem overwhelming.
Enter the Owner's Engineer
The solution of hiring an owner's engineer
has been used for more than a decade. It
emerged as an industry-based initiative along
with the engineer-procure-construct (EPC)
contracting method. The most basic definition
of an owner's engineer is someone or, more
commonly, a team of experts that serves as
an independent advocate for the owner. The
owner's engineer plays a supporting but critical
role by filling gaps and supplementing a
plant owner's resources (Figure 1).
The jobs performed by an owner's engineer
can be large or small and can range from
playing a narrowly defined role as a technical
reviewer to being a full-scale, start-to-finish
extension of the owner's staff who is involved
in all aspects of project development, execuMarch
2011 | POWER
tion, and completion. An owner's engineer
can be a key management tool to control the
number of overall contracts on a large, complex
project and to provide an independent
voice that represents the owner. But owner's
engineers can also be key team members on
smaller projects, such as air quality control
retrofits or plant renovations; in such cases,
they free up the owner's staff to focus on ongoing
operations without distraction.
The most effective owner's engineers are
those who serve in broader, longer roles that
give them time to develop a keen understanding
of owner objectives and develop a close
relationship with the owner. This close relationship
can be essential because the owner's
engineer serves as an advocate for the owner's
business objectives and identifies skill
gaps in the owner's staff that can be filled by
the owner's engineer team.
From Start to Finish
An owner's engineer can help take a project
from concept through commissioning. This
www.powermag.com
can be especially important when personnel
cutbacks or inexperience make it hard for an
owner to manage the intricacies and details of
a project with in-house staff. And, although
there is no way to remove all risks from a
project, an owner's engineer can simultaneously
enhance opportunities, reduce overall
risk, and ensure a deliverable that is closer to
the owner's expectations.
Though it may not seem intuitive, hiring
an owner's engineer can actually reduce a
project's overall capital and operation and
maintenance costs. The expense of the owner's
engineer is often easily counterbalanced
by cost savings obtained through tight control
of the schedule, scope management, change
orders, and overall project controls. The
owner's engineer can also identify design options
that reduce the owner's lifecycle costs.
Even the tendency of an EPC contractor to
raise costs in response to ill-defined scope or
increased risk can be better controlled when
an owner's engineer is working on behalf of
the project owner to develop a tighter scope.
71
1. Independent advocate. The owner's engineer provides experienced engineering talent
to augment a plant owner's staff during design and construction of a plant. The tasks may
focus on single assignments or may span a multi-year project. Courtesy: HDR Engineering
http://www.powermag.com
POWER March 2011

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