With outage season in full swing, Greg McAuley, CTO of TRS Services and lead consultant at sister company GMW Consulting, shares his decades of industry experience below in the post-outage checklist he developed for owner/operators of gas and steam turbine/generators. Post-outage reviews and records are particularly important, McAuley says, because you already paid for the …
What do you do when your gas turbine experiences a forced outage (FO), or as Sulzer’s Jim Neurohr and Michael Andrepont put it, a “bump in the night”? Hopefully, your plant already has a plan in place for such emergencies, and they hope you’ll call Sulzer and let them put their full-service shop in LaPorte, …
Who ya gonna call the day after a ‘bump in the night’? Read More »
In addition to the best practices published on CCJ Onsite earlier this week, here’s a new batch of ideas owner/operators of any gas turbine can employ at their facility. ESSENTIAL POWER NEWINGTON (EPN), managed by Tom Fallon and operated by Cogentrix Energy Power Management, is a merchant facility that runs primarily on natural gas, and …
Woodbridge Energy Center Owned by CPV Shore LLC Operated by CAMS 725 MW, gas-fired 2 × 1 7FA.05-powered combined cycle located in Keasbey, NJ Plant manager: Chip Bergeron Challenge. Woodbridge was notified four months before the planned 2020 fall outage that the generator collector brush systems serving its gas and steam turbines soon would be …
Collector brush system upgrade slashes maintenance requirements Read More »
As usual, a tremendous amount of technical content was offered in two presentations during the HRSG Forum, Jan 28, 2022—No. 7 in a series organized by Chairman Bob Anderson. But the underlying message was more about the state of our industry. A few participants, discussing aging of high-energy piping (HEP), said they were “astonished at …
HRSG Forum discussion centers on creep damage, elemental zinc in weld HAZ areas Read More »
Summaries of MD&A’s spring 2022 webinars on topics of interest to all involved in the operation and maintenance of generating plants powered by gas turbines follow. Both experienced personnel and those new to the industry might benefit from a quick read to identify topics of immediate value and then follow up by listening to recordings …
The road to net zero carbon by, well, pick your date, 2030, 2035, 2050, is paved with pledges, promises, mandates, and political rhetoric, but the landscape will most surely be dotted with gas-fired combined cycles making megawatt-hours when the variable renewable resources are not, according to Jeff Schleis, gas-turbine product manager, EthosEnergy. In a recent …
Thermal performance audit key to extracting more dollars from older plants Read More »
While the industry makes progress towards the fully connected, largely automated powerplant with a meta-organization of onsite staff, remote monitoring and diagnostics (M&D) assistance, and market delivery setpoints, there are some serious and costly gaps that are overlooked in data links and industrial communications. According to Jeff Downen, business owner, Black Start LLC, these gaps …
Plant-network, data-link, communications issues revealed during commissioning Read More »
Once upon a time, a vertically integrated utility was responsible for electricity supply—soup to nuts, that is, from the powerplant to the customer’s meter. Today, responsibility for over half of US power production rests with non-utility entities. Like most big industry shifts, this transition has led to greater efficiencies in some areas, challenges in others. …
Multiple organizations create new challenges for plant operators Read More »
Mike Hoogsteden, Advanced Turbine Support’s director of field services, called to say his company has informed customers that it believes visible-dye liquid penetrant (PT) is the most dependable in-situ inspection process for identifying radial tip cracks in 7FA Stage 0 and Stage 1 rotor blades. The OEM recommends in Technical Information Letter 1509-R3, “F-Class Front-End …
