O&M

All Hail the Maintainers

The iPhone 7, the Tesla Model 3, the latest 4G organic light emitting diode (OLED) television. 

By Brian Schimmoller

The iPhone 7, the Tesla Model 3, the latest 4G organic light emitting diode (OLED) television. Cool stuff, right? The whiz-bang hallmarks of an ever-advancing, innovative, high-tech society.

And yet, how many people do you know who actually own any of these things? Some, certainly – especially the iPhone 7 – but probably not most. [And before I get any hate mail, yes, I know the Tesla Model 3 is not actually on the streets yet, but you can reserve a purchase slot for $1,000.] The majority of us take good care of our existing toys and tools and transition to the newer technology when the price has come down, when the bugs have been worked out, when our current version is finally showing its age. In other words, we are maintainers.

I stole the title of this column from an essay by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel published by the digital magazine Aeon. One line from the lead paragraph of the article reads: “Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructure, the mundane labor that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructure, simply has more impact on people’s lives than the vast majority of technological innovations.” Hard to argue with that.

Think back to the Northeast Blackout of 2003, which knocked out more than 61,000 MW of capacity, left 50 million people without power across parts of the United States and Canada, and resulted in 11 deaths. A devastating event to be sure…and the economic impact was actually many times greater than the value of the lost electricity. A 2004 analysis by the Electricity Consumers Resources Council (ELCON) reviewed a number of economic studies and pegged the total cost at $4-$10 billion, encompassing lost wages, overtime costs, food spoilage, disrupted deliveries, and more. ELCON offered a challenging conclusion: “From a public policy perspective – in the US or Canada – it really does not matter if the total economic damages are $4 billion, $6 billion or $10 billion, or anywhere in between. The point is that this type of event is unconscionable to the extent that a single utility’s failure to properly trim trees is deemed the ‘root cause’ of the August 14 Blackout.”

Maintenance matters, whether it’s the grid, a power plant fleet, the highway system…or your house, your car, your body. There’s nothing profound about that statement. The message, however, is easily marginalized in our society’s mania over the newest app, our homage to the fruits of innovation.

Which is not to say that innovation is unimportant. The world needs both innovators and maintainers, because both are essential in keeping the wheels of progress moving forward.

Russell and Vinsel get rather philosophical at the end of their essay: “Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help us get there? We must shift from means, including the technologies that underpin our everyday actions, to ends, including the many kinds of social beneficence and improvement that technology can offer.”

I’m not sure I’d cast the differing roles of innovators and maintainers in such stark, opposite terms. In fact, I don’t see an inherent conflict between the two – they can and should co-exist.

The “innovation” in the nuclear sector could envelop a wide range of advances. Fusion, traveling wave reactors, maybe even small modular reactors sit on one end of the curve, representing technological advances that could herald a re-imagined nuclear renaissance.

But “innovation” also could take the form of new ways of thinking about existing technology, focused on how we can run and maintain nuclear plants to be safer, cheaper, and more efficient. Can advanced sensors, data analytics, and augmented reality provide the tools to soup up the mundane maintenance of nuclear plants and revitalize their technological and economic viability?

Let’s face it. There won’t be a large number of new nuclear plants in North America over the next 15 years. Demonstrating to the world that the industry can maintain these plants through 60-80 years of operation may be the best path to sustained relevance.

All hail the maintainers.

 

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