This maintenance staffing study is the third in a series of plant staffing benchmarking studies published in POWER. The first, in the September 2004 issue, was on plant operator staffing; the second, in July/August 2006, examined engineering staffing. Taken as a whole, the three surveys provide extraordinary insight into the staffing of most coal-fired power plants. Such unique information is not available elsewhere in the industry at any price.
Though the detailed results are proprietary to EUCG members that participated in it, POWER was given access to the overall findings. If you want details at the plant or unit level, you’ll have to join the EUCG and participate in the next study. Joining the EUCG and participating in its ongoing series of benchmarking studies gives you access to the next layer of detail and a way to rank your plant against its peers.
The study’s scope
The latest plant maintenance staffing benchmarking study by the EUCG (formerly the Electric Utility Cost Group, see sidebar) was based on data from 45 baseload coal-fired plants comprising 142 generating units. Only day-to-day staffing data were collected, to exclude the effects of planned outages on overall staffing levels. Plant, fuel yard, and instrumentation and control (I&C) maintenance personnel were included in this study. The plants range in size from less than 500 MW (27%) to over 2,000 MW (11%), and most are owned by one of 13 geographically dispersed utilities. Of the 45 plants, 71% report that that their fuel mix includes at least 50% Powder River Basin (PRB) coal or lignite. A little over half (58%) reported that a regional maintenance supervision and craft workforce was available to work at the plant.
Several other characteristics of the study population add perspective to the survey results. For example, based on responses, 16% of the steam generators have cyclone furnaces, 13% have been retrofitted with a flue gas desulfurization (FGD) system, and 18% have a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. Not surprisingly, 82% of the units report having a plant distributed control system (DCS), but only 11% have cooling towers. Some 74% of respondents said their plants have an equivalent availability factor (EAF) greater than 85%, and 44% said their EAF is above 90%.
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