Point sources
Quotations from owner/operators of different types of plants contacted as part of the research project provided interesting anecdotal information. Astute readers may be able to distill some trends from these anecdotes:
- “No one has written a CMMS [computerized maintenance management system] program to fit a combined-cycle plant.” The respondent’s plant is now suffering through the fifth revision of its CMMS software.
- “The best plant engineers and operators go to the M&D [monitoring and diagnostics] center.” The respondent called the personnel migration a “key factor” in the center’s success, in part because it overcame the remaining plant staffers’ initial, “big brother” attitude toward the project.
- “We could do lots of performance monitoring in the DCS, but our approach is to do it through the data historian,” said the manager of a fleet of combined-cycle plants.
- “Corporate IT runs everything. All plant software has to be blessed by IT”—the manager of another combined-cycle fleet.
- “We want to incentivize our [operators] to reduce plant costs by correlating them with financial losses avoided by our predictive analytics package”—the manager of a coal-fired fleet.
- “Our knowledge management system helps us manage staff reductions by capturing expertise”—the manager of another coal-fired fleet.
- “The impact of fuel characteristics is a new variable for our operators”—a staffer at a plant that recently switched to Powder River Basin coal.
Final thoughts
Clearly, the industry goal stated in the POWER article a decade ago—integrating diverse plant IT software and systems into a versatile and powerful knowledge management platform—remains elusive. Too many pieces are still missing. Among them are the ability to analyze and handle fuel in real time and a way to optimize the operation of pollution control devices within a plant’s overall process control, automation, and optimization scheme. Unfortunately, it will take another 10 years to determine whether the next generation of power plants being designed and built today delivers more of the considerable promise of integrated knowledge management.
—Jason Makansi (jmakansi@pearlstreetinc.com) is president of Pearl Street Inc., a technology deployment services firm.
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