August 15, 2006

Profiling your plant engineering staff

James Patrick, Ameren; Robert Oldani, DTE Energy; and Daryl Von Behren, Kansas City Power & Light and EUCG Inc., Fossil Productivity Committee

Group promotes excellence

The EUCG, founded in 1973, is an association of utility professionals that provides a forum through which electric utilities can improve their operating, maintenance, and construction performance. It holds technical conferences, including workshops, twice yearly for the purpose of information exchange. The EUCG is organized into committees and working groups by interest areas such as fossil, nuclear, and hydroelectric plants; transmission and distribution; and IT.

Among the key functions of the EUCG is providing process and market benchmarks, unit reliability strategies, and best practice applications to help members excel in a competitive market. The Fossil Productivity Committee (FPC) has 30 electric utility members that report operating data on 314 individual units. A "Data Membership" in the EUCG entitles utilities to receive the complete benchmarking data set customized for their plant. The FPC recently initiated the development of a combined-cycle/combustion turbine cost and performance database that currently has 16 utilities reporting data on 415 individual units from 93 plants.

The plant engineering and technical staffing benchmarking study discussed in this article is an ongoing EUCG project. If you would like to include your plants in the study database and receive a copy of the complete study (with your data included), please contact the EUCG.

For more information about the EUCG, contact Pat Kovalesky, executive director, at 623-572-4140 or visit www.eucg.org.

The study's scope

The EUCG's brand-new plant engineering and technical staffing benchmarking study was based on data received from 62 plants with a total of 217 units. Ranging in size from less than 500 MW (22%) to over 2,000 MW (15%), most of the plants are owned by one of 17 geographically diverse utilities. Some 92% of the plants are coal-fired, 8% burn gas or oil, and 69% consider themselves baseload generators. Of the coal-fired units, 52% report that that their fuel mix includes at least 50% Powder River Basin (PRB) coal or lignite.

Other characteristics of the study population provide deeper insight into E&T staffing needs. For example, only 11% of respondents said their plant uses a flue gas desulfurization (FGD) system, whereas 20% report operating a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Surprisingly, only 81% said their plant is equipped with a distributed control system (DCS). One in three respondents claimed their plant's equivalent availability factor was greater than 90% last year, while almost as many (31%) said it fell between 85% and 90%.