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

Plants, people aging together

Cultivating and keeping experienced plant technical talent is a never-ending chore for plant managers. We hire go-getters and then wonder why—after getting a few years' experience under their belts and finally becoming valuable contributors to the E&T team—they hat up and head for greener pastures.

The results of this latest EUCG benchmarking study pretty much repeat what you've probably seen elsewhere: 62% of E&T staffers have worked in a plant for 10 to 20 years, with 24% able to claim more than two decades of experience. Overall, 86% of the E&T staffers at responding plants said they have more than 10 years' experience, 11% said their career in power has been shorter than 10 years, and 3% have been in the field less than five years. Clearly, the plant experience pyramid has been turned upside down.

One area where experience is highly valued because it's tough to come by is plant control systems. Some 32% of respondents noted that their generating units are controlled by systems that are 10 to 20 years old; another 10% said theirs is twenty-something. Maintaining antiquated controls is very labor-intensive, and at the typical older plant the control systems are kept alive by those who saw the plant commissioned. You can't easily replace that experience.

Finally, only one-fifth of respondents noted that they are using neural networks for monitoring or controlling their units. Of course, without a DCS, a neural net is not in your future. Conversely, among those who reported using a neural net system (13 plants), it was unanimous that additional E&T support is needed to extract the desired benefits.