June 15, 2008

Focus on O&M (June 2008)

Broader personnel objectives

Excellent training that makes the most of modern tools may be more important now than ever, because power plant personnel are no longer expected to learn a trade and perform it competently for decades and then retire. Rather, each person is expected to strive to be a self-contained, multiskilled unit that has depth of understanding, can fill in where needed, and can continuously update his or her skills portfolio. Self-sufficient cells of competence and cross-training are the order of the day, not vertical hierarchical organizations.

3. Diagnose pending failures. You can’t fix a problem you can’t see. The step-down transformer powering the cooling tower of Lawrence Energy Center’s Unit 5 was on the verge of a catastrophic failure that would have shut down the entire plant. A thermographic inspection diagnosed the problem as a broken or loose rotor bar. Repairs were completed before the transformer failed. Courtesy: Westar Energy

At the same time as workplace staffing expectations are changing, so too are plant tools. As a consequence, training programs are being designed to present the advanced technology tools now commonplace in the typical power plant: predictive maintenance software, lube oil analysis, and thermography, to name a few (Figure 3).

Achieving this vision of a flexible, multiskilled workforce should not be considered a corporate objective, either. With the permanent, structural changes in the workforce, global competition, accelerated technological change, and deregulation in the power industry it has become every individual’s responsibility to view learning and skill development as constant throughout one’s career. Today, if you find yourself performing a repetitive job—pushing the same buttons at a power plant, drafting flow sheets, or calculating the same parameters—your skill will likely become obsolete and eventually be consolidated or even replaced by a computer or robot, or outsourced.

Avoiding human error

In many ways, a competition is ensuing between plant operators and computers. In some cases, better training can give operators the advantage. Consider this: Executives at a Midwest nuclear station plotted the causes of plant error, assigning those causes to hardware, documentation, or personnel categories. After determining that personnel errors were far too high, management implemented a focused training program designed to reduce the error rate, and results were quantified. The program included aspects of airline-type training videos, awareness training, peer videos in which workers shared lessons learned with other employees, and improved communications.

At other facilities, workers are trained to minimize errors by avoiding intervention in the facility’s control system unless absolutely required. Thus, the operator is essentially trained to maintain vigilance over the computer control system, not necessarily the plant itself.

One plant veteran gives this prediction, tongue only lightly in cheek: The power plant of the future will be operated by two creatures: one operator and one dog. The operator will be there to feed the dog, and the dog will be there to keep the operator’s hands off the equipment.

—From the editors of POWER