Terry Schoenborn has certainly noticed this renewed interest, which he attributes to projected rising electricity demand from data centers and manufacturing.

“In the last 10 years, there hasn’t been as many new greenfield sites going in, but we’re starting to see some of that activity pick up,” said Schoenborn, who is Senior Vice President of Operations and Maintenance (O&M) at EthosEnergy.

This was just one trend discussed in a recent interview with Schoenborn, who highlighted the evolving market dynamics that are shaping plant O&M.

Plants are changing hands

Schoenborn told us there is a lot of Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activity right now in the power generation market, driven by factors like the Inflation Reduction Act and a renewed interest in reliable gas capacity.

“I just think it’s a dynamic market right now,” he said, “and there are opportunities for investors to take advantage.”

As assets flip, adaptation is important for EthosEnergy, which has operated more than 100 generation facilities (mostly gas) dating back to its inception in 2014.

For example, the company was recently awarded O&M contracts for six natural gas combined-cycle (NGCC) plants in Mexico. This was shortly after the Iberdrola-owned facilities were sold to private equity firm Mexico Infrastructure Partners (MIP).

When EthosEnergy takes over O&M for multiple, let alone six plants at once, the process of scaling up manpower and training can be challenging. The work starts with assessing the condition and staffing levels of those facilities.

Schoenborn said some plants EthosEnergy takes on are in good condition and others require more care and effort.

“We may have to have more resources, spend time at that plant to get it up to speed or the level that our customers expect,” said Schoenborn.

A plant’s condition often depends on where it is in its lifecycle and how much a customer thinks it can extract out of it, he said.

“It could be just as simple as, if the customer knew they were selling the asset, they are probably not going to invest as much into it,” he said. “So it just gets into disrepair.”

While EthosEnergy has close to 800 employees in its O&M division, the company has brought in approximately 100-150 just in the last two years as it has taken on new contracts.

The importance of peaking power

Gas turbines are taking an increasingly important role as peaking power sources, since they can be ramped up and down quickly to meet demand spikes, filling in gaps when renewable resources are not generating electricity.

For that reason EthosEnergy earlier this year launched its Houston-based Performance Center, where the company monitors generators in 20 different countries.

The center combines 24/7 remote start-stop capabilities with monitoring and diagnostics. EthosEnergy operators control start-stop operations through encrypted cyber-secure VPN technology. They can use video surveillance to monitor a customer’s assets using real-time thermal imaging.

Schoenborn noted a lot of peaking plants with low capacity factors are fully-staffed and operate almost on-call. He said using the performance center is a good solution to optimize the reliability of these assets that sit idle most of the time, and from a cost perspective.

“We felt like it was a something we needed to have to play in this market,” Schoenborn told us.

Schoenborn said the capabilities of the performance center have opened up new discussions with customers, particularly as the energy transition may run slower than anticipated.

As customers target aggressive net-zero goals, EthosEnergy works with them to develop realistic maintenance strategies. Schoenborn emphasized the importance of maintaining reliability without overinvesting in assets that could be repurposed or shut down in the near-future.

“How we’re working with them is saying, ‘Let’s really sit down and talk about what maintenance you need to have to make sure you maintain the same level of reliability,’” he said.

Watch the full interview with Terry Schoenborn above.

Nuclear will play a crucial role in the transition to net-zero, not only because it’s the second-lowest emitter of CO2, but also because its resilience and reliability ensures security of supply in a system using increasing amounts of intermittent renewables. We need a resilient energy supply to power the transition to net-zero, one that can also tackle the increase in demand that electrification of transport and heat will create.

The UK’s target to fully decarbonize its energy generation by 2035 is no small task. Replacing aging plants and ensuring sufficient energy capacity to meet demand is estimated to require around 159 to 203 GW of new assets: that’s equivalent to building the UK’s entire energy system twice over in under 13 years.

By 2030, power generation is scheduled to have ended at seven UK advanced gas reactor nuclear power stations, yet many of the new generation assets won’t come online before 2036.

Time is not on our side

Time is not on our side: it can take over a decade to design, construct and commission new assets. The clock is ticking and we need to find ways to not only increase the pace of new build development but also extend the useful life of existing plants.

Extensive manpower is also required to achieve these goals and the sector has a skills gap that’s cause for concern. This reaches across all stages of the nuclear lifecycle, from design and development through to operations, maintenance to decommissioning. The reason? An aging workforce – a third of which is expected to retire in the next 15 years.

Without digital, nuclear will fail to achieve its true potential

If we’re to overcome these challenges and ensure nuclear fulfils its potential in the future energy mix, the sector simply must embrace digital tools and the benefits they bring.

Every major engineering industry is embracing a digital future, and the supply chain is starting to demand it. If nuclear doesn’t adapt, then it risks being left behind, operating with the same on-site uncertainty, bottlenecks and lack of early warnings while others move forward and reap digital’s rewards.

The simple truth is this: digital can make a difference at every point of the nuclear lifecycle, and the sector needs to take advantage of the tools at its disposal.

Digital’s role in plant design and construction

The related cost savings will ensure the necessary funds are available to meet the UK’s required build rate of the next generation of nuclear plants, which can also be enhanced through the use of digital tools.

The design and construction of plants are incredibly complex and processes often could – and should – be optimized. Prioritization of tasks may be inefficient or KPIs subjective, for example, but when a fully collaborative and consistent digital approach is adopted it’s not just a digital transformation that takes place.

By pulling all data into one single digital source, transparency and risk awareness is transformed, which in turn helps to optimize processes and decision-making.

Capturing, reusing, codifying and analyzing data also has the ability to speed up the traditional design process by up to 80%. With time sorely of the essence, why wouldn’t you take advantage of such abilities?

A process digital twin, for example, transforms the design process by integrating a simulation model into the early stages. This way the design is completed in a digitally-integrated way to ensure everything remains up-to-date. This improves workflows between disciplines, significantly reducing the chance of repetition to improve efficiencies.

As well as cutting start-up time and overall risk, costs can also be saved. 3D modelling can lower costs by up to 30%, for example, while 15% can be saved on the overall installed cost through design optimization.

Data captured during design and construction can also add value throughout the nuclear lifecycle.

One of the main challenges the sector faces is scattered, unstructured data from legacy plants. By recording and storing data from the start, we can also help to optimize processes in the operations and decommissioning stages.

Digital’s role in asset management and plant life extension

Digital twins can simulate and evaluate alternative maintenance and operational strategies, enabling you to identify the most cost-effective options for your plant.

Then there’s AI-powered predictive maintenance, which can lower unplanned downtime by 35%, saving tens of millions in asset failure prevention and providing a secure energy supply. Its use has also been proven to extend a site’s useful life by 10% – critical given the plant life extensions currently being implemented across the UK.

Digital’s role in decommissioning and waste management

As an operational plant comes to the end of its life, digital plays a part. By capturing and making data available, those involved can have a 360° view of a plant and can determine efficiencies that will accelerate the dismantling and demolition of plants, freeing up valuable real estate for new nuclear facilities to be built.

Webcast recording: The Decommissioning & Re-purposing eco-system – vital to the energy transition

Plugging the skills gap

We also need digital to overcome the challenge of a shrinking skilled workforce. The knowledge of industry stalwarts should be gathered and stored before it becomes lost, plus automation can provide efficiencies and help tackle workforce attrition by augmenting human personnel.

Furthermore, robotics can ensure the continued safety of staff. By replacing people with remotely-operated robots in hazardous situations, workers’ exposure to radiation is lowered, if not entirely removed.

Robots also aren’t restricted to how long they can work in a hazardous environment. Using such tools means time working onsite can be increased and tasks completed faster. Consider this – a 20% schedule saving over a 120-year decommissioning program could reduce overall timescales by a generation.

Barriers to break

Looking forward, nuclear simply cannot afford not to embrace technology. If it’s to meet its potential, we need the benefits of digital – efficiency, reduced costs, increased safety and sustainability – but there are several barriers standing in the way of the sector’s digital transformation.

Firstly, we need to ensure people don’t feel threatened by technologies such as AI and robotics, which have been developed to augment rather than replace. Then we need to improve confidence in cybersecurity. Trust is low, yet it’s actually been proven that people are the weakest link, as 99% of cyberattacks use techniques such as phishing to trick users into installing malware.

The boardroom also has a role to play by embracing new business models that require investment up front to realize long-term efficiencies. However, that shouldn’t be too tough, as the pandemic brought to the forefront how invaluable technology can be and has already accelerated investment.

We need to take learning from the rapid progress achieved during the last three years, as well as the sense of urgency that powered it. If we don’t, nuclear simply won’t be able to achieve its full potential as a central part of the UK’s net zero energy system.

Read more about the nuclear sector’s digitalization journey in SNC-Lavalin’s report, Digital in nuclear: our vision for 2035.

AWS’s capabilities are expected to better enable MDR’s technology to collect and analyze large volumes of data to monitor for cyber threats.

Secure cloud capabilities that can integrate digital applications and leverage sensitive data – such as real-time monitoring and detection – add an important and cost-effective tool to the defensive arsenal for industrial security analysts, Siemens Energy said.

And, Jeff Miers, director of Partners and Alliances, Energy & Utilities Business Unit at AWS, said that cloud “is accelerating innovation across the energy value chain and a key enabler to more resilient energy infrastructure.” 

The Siemens software is an AI-driven cybersecurity monitoring and detection service for industrial operating technologies (OT). As designed, MDR creates and monitors a data stream. It then uses machine learning to learn and monitor the relationships between variables in clients’ OT workflows, flagging anomalies for human analysts. A rules-based engine is intended to enable MDR to prioritize the most consequential alerts and focus human attention where it is needed. 

MDR is built on the Eos.ii plaform and is intended to be vendor-agnostic, standardizing inputs from multiple machine languages.

In operation, analysts can refer to site architecture – both the digital network, and the 3-D relationships between physical equipment – or can examine the operating history of a particular device, its operating parameters, and any threats known to affect its specific make and model.

MDR incorporates threat intelligence feeds and information needed to evaluate if newly identified threats affect defended systems. Its design also is intended to detect novel attacks on OT and prioritize alerts based on anticipated consequences. 

Siemens said that MDR monitoring and detection also can help identify some maintenance issues.

More information is available here.

Editor's Note: Clarion Energy's Kevin Clark is on the ground in Houston for CERAWeek and is reporting the latest from the conference.

Digitalization is now a must for power companies looking to be more efficient, reliable and sustainable during a period of accelerated change.

Software company AVEVA offers data management, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies to help power producers optimize the performance of their plants and other assets.

AVEVA's David Thomason, who is Industry Principal of Global Power Generation, spoke with Clarion Energy at CERAWeek about the future of cloud-based platforms for managing power plant data and how an increase in distributed energy resources (DERs) is affecting the way data is used, stored and shared.

Watch:

AVEVA's David Thomason will be speaking at "Data and Analytics in the Age of Renewables – From Generation to the Meter," a session at this year's POWERGEN International - scheduled for May 23-25, 2022 in Dallas, Texas.

Less than 20% of data generated by industrial companies is actually used. Even less is analyzed. This means up to 80% of data is lost for analytics and decision-making.

Heavy industries have been slow to take advantage of the digital revolution, causing these crucial sectors to miss out on the hidden efficiencies and asset protections provided by artificial intelligence and a data-driven world.

One size doesn’t fit all.

ABB executives joined Power Engineering for an exclusive Q&A to talk about the ABB Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite, the digital revolution for industry, and how to navigate the energy transition using your own data.

Power Engineering: How has the digital revolution evolved in recent years for industry?

Rajesh Ramachandran, Chief Digital Officer, ABB Process Automation: With the advent of digitalization, vast amounts of real-time sensor and operational data, transaction data, and engineering design data is at our disposal from various sources. Our opportunity is to collect and contextualize this data to develop analytics that use artificial intelligence to help users make better business decisions.

Less than 20% of data generated by industrial companies is actually used. Even less is analyzed. This means up to 80% of data is lost for analytics and decision-making. Unless technology is deeply integrated with operational processes, the path to Industry 4.0 value realization will remain slow.

PE: And how about the impact of A.I.?

RR: The proliferation of artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques using sensors, digital data, and remote inputs allows us combine information from a variety of sources, analyze it instantly, and act on the insights derived. With improvements in storage systems, processing speeds and analytical techniques, we are greatly improving analysis and decision making.

We have been using artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring a higher degree of prediction accuracy to optimize operations, processes, and assets. Applying AI to industries that one understands and in which one has significant experience enables safer, smarter, and more sustainable operations.

PE: How has A.I. influenced remote monitoring?

RR: Traditional condition monitoring ascertains the health of an asset based on hard-coded alarms and experienced analysts. This approach however can lead to false alarms or late diagnosis of abnormal behaviors or faults. This approach also looks at signals from a single sensor (maybe two) and fails to provide a holistic picture of asset health.

Data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine-learning methods overcome these gaps and diagnose the health of an asset based on a combination of sensor signals to generate prescriptive advice. Additionally, AI techniques can be used to predict future health and calculate the remaining life of an asset. This can reduce maintenance costs and improve production uptime by allowing users to apply reliability-centered maintenance instead of traditional time-based maintenance that may add unnecessary interactions and induce failures.

AI in the future will supplement traditional condition monitoring by establishing an expert system to provide early warning of potential faults, generate prescriptions to address them, and accurately estimate the remaining life of the asset.

PE: What types of other industries are requesting this technology?

RR: All asset-intensive industries can use this kind of technology, including:

• Oil & gas
• Chemicals
• Refining
• Metals
• Pulp & paper
• Cement
• Mining
• Power generation
• Water
• Food & Beverage
• Life Sciences
• Manufacturing

PE: How can Genix improve performance and extend asset lifetime?

Gino Hernandez, Head of Global Digital Business for ABB Energy Industries: One of the key solutions developed in the Genix Industrial Analytics and AI suite is the Genix APM Suite. “APM” stands for “Asset Performance Management.” Genix APM collects and organizes data from operating assets through information and operational technology such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Computerized Maintenance Management and Enterprise Asset Management systems. 

Next, Genix APM calculates expected performance, models faults, and contextualizes data using past performance, AI, and prescriptive and predictive analytics. Key to this contextualization is domain knowledge from both ABB and end-user subject matter experts.  Leading technology in knowledgeable, experienced hands helps users to decide when and how to maintain assets, improve asset performance, extend asset life, and plan asset replacement.

PE: Conventional power generators are under mounting pressure from corporations and investors, often constraining budgets.  Is asset performance and monitoring, within digitization, being appropriately prioritized by asset owners?

GH: Asset optimization and health continues to be a high priority in all industrial operations. Digitalization and sustainability interests have accelerated business strategies and corporate initiatives toward better asset utilization. This leads to better cost control in the short term, and delivers strategic advantages over the long term as maintenance schedules are tuned, faults predicted, and issues mitigated before they become problems. Economic conditions are no longer the same as when users originally purchased their assets.  The focus is now on maintaining existing assets in order to retain cash. Maintenance is evolving from reactive or preventive to condition-based, with the next steps being prescriptive maintenance strategies using advanced predictive techniques.

Demand volatility causes end users to operate in a way that was not planned for; therefore, better understanding and control of asset performance is more important than ever. This approach also helps reinforce sustainability by retaining existing assets instead of buying new ones.

PE: What have you heard from customers who have implemented the Genix platform?

Tariq Farooqui, Group Vice President and Head of Digital Portfolio Management, PA Digital: A large customer from the power sector is using Genix APM for predictive analytics. Genix APM combines data science and physical modeling to all production assets regardless of manufacturer. The solution helps customers make more informed decisions for maintaining and operating their assets, providing warning of critical failures and health diagnostics of assets while providing performance and efficiency KPIs.

Another large customer that is operating data centers around the world uses Genix to reduce energy usage in cooling systems, which consumes the most electrical power in a data center next to the IT equipment. Optimizing cooling efficiency in turn improves power usage effectiveness and reduces the carbon footprint, with an estimated reduction of 1,100 tons of carbon in the atmosphere for every 10MW of IT load utilized. This is equivalent to saving approximately 18,000 trees. With the ability to glean AI-generated insights, this customer can effectively capture, contextualize, track, and analyze data generated by various systems in the data center, and better facilitate dynamic cooling optimization to reduce costs.

A large mining customer can extract and contextualize data from their operational, information and engineering systems using Genix. With Genix, the user applies advanced analytics to track important KPIs, find root causes wherever there are deviations, and perform predictive and prescriptive analytics.

PE: What about industrial customers who have to adhere to strict sustainability goals or regulations?

Dave Lincoln, Head of Global Digital Business for ABB Measurement & Analytics: Sustainability goals require accurate measurement of the environmental impact of a particular process, site, or company. At its most simple level, digitalization enables aggregation and visualization of a range of measurement data coming from potentially disparate systems, and converts that data into relevant units such as CO2 output, KWH consumed, Megaliters of water treated, etc.  Live sustainability data allows companies to immediately understand how they are performing against specific KPIs and to take informed action where required. A more intelligent system connects sustainability data with process data to predict future outputs, and can even automatically tune processes to reduce environmental impact.

Many regulatory-driven measurements are required in industry, including chimney stack emissions and water effluent discharge. Measurements are often taken continuously, and require the data to be securely stored for many years. These systems are often complex and require regular maintenance to ensure that accurate and reliable data is collected. Digitalization enables remote management of these systems, thus reducing downtime and easing efforts to operate and manage them. This in turn allows plants to focus on process performance to eliminate emissions, as well as to reduce energy and water consumption.

A large industrial plant could potentially have many continuous emission monitoring systems. These complex systems require skilled onsite personnel to ensure that they are operating accurately with the very high availability requirements demanded. Routine inspection and measurement validation of each system consumes many hours per month, which may not directly benefit the company or the environment in terms of emissions reduction. Digitalization is creating new opportunities to reduce and even remove this manual inspection effort.

Remote monitoring of emission monitoring systems using Genix Datalyzer automates data collection and enables full remote management. Diagnostic data is used to identify potential failure mechanisms before they occur, reducing risk of downtime. Additionally, Datalyzer provides a validation report (known as QAL3 in Europe) of the measurement accuracy that can be given to the local regulatory organization to provide evidence that the system is performing correctly. These features reduce many hours of work each month. This solution provides data-driven insights that are shifting business models toward CEMS-as-a-Service and outcome-based agreements.

PE: How does Genix allow ABB to maximize data from existing clients?

Rajesh Ramachandran, Chief Digital Officer, ABB Process Automation: ABB Ability™ Genix is an enterprise-grade, open architecture-based platform and suite, which harnesses the power of industrial analytics and artificial intelligence to transform cross-functional data into actionable insights. Data used extends across diverse systems: operational, information, and engineering technology. We designed ABB Ability™ Genix with scalability in mind to have a platform that extends from the asset level through asset ecosystems at plants and enterprises, addressing the needs of multiple stakeholders. The basic value proposition is the collection, collation, and contextualization of large amounts of asset data.

Genix offers a key advantage: many of the assets used by ABB customers in their operations come from ABB, such as analyzers, control systems, drives, generators, motors, PLCs, robots, switchgear, and more. ABB is positioned, then, to know how to extract data from these assets, to understand what the data indicates, and to identify opportunities to improve the performance of these assets.

Gino Hernandez, Head of Global Digital Business for ABB Energy Industries:

Every industry has a unique way of operating assets depending on the desired outcome.  For example, a feed pump serving a distillation column is a very different application from a pump circulating cooling water in a power plant.  The digital model for these pumps may be similar, and even display similar information in a dashboard. However, because the application of the model is so different, they require current, accurate, application-specific use cases and models for precise use.  Genix APM can be configured for specific industries, including power generation. Existing uses of Genix APM include diagnosing discrepancies across gas turbine compressors, revealing a leakage problem in an HRSG, and early detection of unbalance in a hydro turbine. 

PE: What is the biggest pain point that you hear from customers who are making the digital transformation?

Tariq Farooqui, Head of Sales, ABB Process Automation Digital: Some of the bigger pain points that customers are facing in their digital transformation journey include:

• Inability to leverage the vast amount of data generated in the organization since the data is in silos; that is, different operational, information and engineering technology systems, and not in a form that can be used for further analysis and decision-making. In fact, many customers see that nearly 80% of their data is not usable.
• Inability to find dependencies between data points from different sources. Even where the data is available, it is not contextualized.
• Inability to develop AI models and deploy them at scale. Customers are able to deploy small AI pilots, but are not able to scale in a full production deployment.
• Inability to develop and deploy analytics applications rapidly with lower time to value.
• Inability to find suppliers that can bring data, domain and analytics expertise together. Suppliers who are good in AI and analytics often are not able to bring the domain understanding to apply the analytics in the right industrial context. Also, vendors are not able to solve end-to-end requirements.

PE: How does digitization fit into cybersecurity and risk management planning?

Robert Putman, Global Manager, Cyber Security Services: To harness digitalization’s full capability and benefits, one must have confidence that previously unconnected systems won’t add risk to the organization’s overall goals. The advantages of digitalization are improved productivity, less environmental impact and accelerated innovation. The risk of digitalization and system interconnectivity is low when managed correctly using available security controls and strategies, making the decision of digitalization and its benefits simple.

Take Colonial Pipeline, for example. Colonial Pipeline embraced digitalization by connecting the customer’s meters used to bill the customer for the product received. Under normal circumstances, this approach increased Colonial’s billing quality while reducing labor costs. The implementation focused on the benefits while the associated risk was not prioritized. With relatively minor modifications, benefits could have been realized without exposing the operations to the outcome of the ransomware attack.     

While risk assessments are a common practice in Information Technology, they are often overlooked in Operational Technology. OT systems share many of the same characteristics of IT systems, yet have more Health, Safety and Environmental risk. One must make sure that a compromised IT network will not propagate into the OT network. In the unlikely event of a cyber incident, one must have a documented and tested incident response plan ready to ensure correct and speedy production recovery.

Once completed, the Limerick plant would be the first fully digital safety system upgrade at a U.S. nuclear power facility. Exelon will spend $42 million while the U.S. Department of Energy will kick in the $50 million.

“Through this partnership, DOE and Exelon will pave the way for modernization of control room systems across the U.S. nuclear fleet,” said Kathryn D. Huff, Acting Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy. “These upgrades will strengthen the case for extending the operation of U.S. nuclear plants into the future, ensuring we maintain access to our nation’s largest source of emissions-free electricity.” 

Related story: Exelon separating Generation from T&D utilities in publicly traded spinoff

Exelon has retained Westinghouse Electric Co. to replace the analog reactor protection system and other equipment with digital controllers over the next five years. This effort marks the first fully digital safety system modernization using the new ISG-06 Alternate Review Process protocol, which optimizes the process of licensing digital safety system upgrades. 

The results of this effort will be directly applicable to other U.S. boiling water reactors, which represent about one-third of the nation’s existing nuclear fleet. The 2.3-GW Limerick’s two units operate GE Type 4 boiling water reactors and provides enough electricity for close to two million homes, according to the company.

The DOE said that pressurized water and future advanced reactors should be able to apply the lessons learn from the Limerick digitalization to future reactor demonstrations.

In 2020 Limerick generated nearly 19 million MWh of carbon-free electricity. A report earlier this indicated that Exelon Generation’s complete nuclear fleet performed at a capacity factor of more than 95 percent totaled nearly 150 million MWh in net generation.

Bechtel began building the Montgomery County facility in the mid-1970s, with Unit 1 entering commercial operation in 1986 and Unit 2 four years later. Limerick is licensed by federal regulators into the 2040s.

Nuclear power plants generate close to 20 percent of the U.S. electricity utility-scale total and more than half of the nation’s carbon-free power.

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Decarbonization, Digitalization and Optimizing Plant Performance are all singular content tracks happen at the POWERGEN International live event Jan. 26-28 in Dallas. Registration is now open.

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The three-year effort includes work and equipment from ASCO Power Technologies, Affiliated Engineers, Engineers without Borders and Schneider Electric. The microgrid delivers energy security for the Hogan Alberque para Ninos Jesus de Nazaret children’s home in Puerto Rico.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria’s utter devastation to the U.S. territory island’s grid, the mountaintop children’s home experienced repeated outages to electric service. The loss of power also happened routinely prior to 2017, according to the ASCO case study report.

Work began on the Hogar Alberque children’s home in 2018, with microgrid equipment installed last year. To complete the project, equipment was delivered, installed and activated including inverters from Schneider Electric and Series 300 automatic transfer switches donated by ASCO.

“Not only was an innovative design implemented between the inverters and two-ATS combination,” says mentor Alberto G. Cordero, PE, of Affiliated Engineers. “But the collaborative spirit of all the professionals and students was inspiring and an example to follow. The Hogar’s staff and children report nothing but many thanks and appreciation.”

During utility outages, the primary transfer switch shifts load to a solar and battery storage system, according to the ASCO report. If the solar-storage system becomes depleted, a secondary transfer switch starts the engine and transfer load to the emergency diesel-powered generator.

The project components include 96 Hanwha Q+ 340-watt solar photovoltaic panels and four  Blue Ion 2.0 50-Vdc lithium-on batteries, rated at 16 kWh each. Schneider provided two 6.8-kW and two 5.5-kW Context XW+ inverters,

The University of Wisconsin’s student chapter of Engineers without Borders (pictured) and Affiliated Engineers of Madison, Wisc. worked together on developing and overseeing the children’s home microgrid project.

Mitsubishi Power is contracted to deliver its TOMONI digital tools for Unit 1 of the Joetsu Thermal Power Station in Joetsu city, Niigate Prefecture. The 572-MW CCGT plant is scheduled to begin operations in December 2022.

The TOMONI digital suite will function within controls and monitoring for Mitsubishi Power’s JAC series gas-fired turbines being installed in the heart of the Joetsu plant. The JAC turbines are installed and could begin trial runs by March 2022, according to the company.

The digital solutions applied to this project allow the various services to be used via cloud computing accessible from the customer’s computer, Mitsubishi Power noted. The Joetsu Thermal Power Station Unit 1 will utilize many TOMONI data analysis applications to support operations and maintenance (O&M), optimizing plant efficiency and equipment inspections, which will help to reduce CO₂ emissions, thus reducing plant maintenance and operation costs.

Mitsubishi Power tested the TOMONI digital solutions at its T-Point 2 power plant R&D facility in Takasago.

The Joetsu complex originally was planned as a liquefied natural gas power station joint venture between Chubu Electric and Tohoku Electric. A few years later, the Chubu operations were transferred to JERA, while Tohoku continued its side of the project.

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Digitalization and Optimizing Plant Performance are both content tracks for POWERGEN International happening live Jan. 26-28 in Dallas. Registration is now open.

After the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan passed with strong bipartisan support, a new wave of opportunities and development for infrastructure leaders has been created.

Alongside this capital infusion are some concerns about how this will impact an already weakening construction workforce together with Covid restrictions and what lies ahead for the future.

In order to approach a solution, we must first understand the problem. What are the existing challenges facing infrastructure leaders? Some of the most critical issues are the aging workforce, adapting to new technologies, the lack of skilled workers and labor shortages.

As infrastructure workers age and eventually retire, companies are faced with a loss of critical knowledge and experience. This knowledge must be passed on to new employees who do not yet have the skills that their predecessors had. Acquiring those skills takes time and resources. With the need to plan for new construction projects fast approaching, time and resources are limited.

Change is never easy. While business leaders recognize the need for digital transformation, adapting to new technologies can be difficult. It’s important to take a change management approach and create a detailed plan for adopting new solutions throughout an organization.

Attracting the right talent is difficult in the face of stiff competition from other industries, a negative view of trade jobs, and insufficient educational programs. As more infrastructure plans get underway, the lack of skilled workers will have a big impact on the ability to complete these ambitious projects.

The new U.S. government infrastructure plan is sure to create a massive amount of new projects for modernizing electrical grids, updating aging gas networks and water systems, building new high-speed internet connections, repairing crumbling roads and bridges, and more. All of this will require a plethora of engineers, technicians, machine operators, and other workers. With an already existing shortage of workers and multiple construction projects occurring at the same time, workforce competition will increase.

The future of utility construction is critical to the success of the government’s plan to build modern infrastructures, which will allow the US to improve public safety, innovate and remain competitive. Digital transformation and sustainability are two of the key drivers of change for the industry’s workforce.

Transforming manual, time-consuming processes with digital solutions will continue to be the top focus for industry leaders to increase safety and improve efficiencies. Technology can fill the gap left by the workforce shortage by automating repetitive tasks and therefore reducing manual labor.

For example, project close-outs typically involve substantial amounts of manual work. Handwritten notes, paper forms and drawings are delivered to technicians who must manually enter the data into the system of record. This process often involves phone calls, kickbacks and guesswork to complete. It then becomes the source of incomplete information or errors, causing delays as technicians need to spend more time communicating with crews to fill in missing details or correct errors.

Digital construction technology transforms this manual process by creating a fully integrated digital workflow. A digital job packet is created (which includes the design and work orders) and then distributed to field crews and contractors. They can begin collecting data digitally without filling in any paper forms, which ensures high levels of accuracy while preventing duplicate data entries. The use of Digital Construction Management (DCM) technology can dramatically speed up the process: one utility reported a 70% reduction in project cycle time and a 90% decrease in time required to perform material reconciliation when using a DCM platform.

Digitalization and the Future of Electricity will be key when POWERGEN International returns live

POWERGEN Jan. 26-28 in Dallas–Registration is open!

Government leaders around the world are investing in sustainability and renewable energy initiatives, such as Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). DERs are changing the way energy is generated and consumed, but they also require sophisticated technologies driven by high fidelity data.

Developing these new energy sources requires new skills that much of the existing workforce does not yethave. A recent EY study found that “60% of the workforce requires reskilling or upskilling,” so there is a significant opportunity to retrain existing workers for the needs of future energy infrastructure projects.

Investments in new infrastructures that support DERs will create new jobs that require new skills. Many will be technology-focused, such as data science, predictive analytics and cloud computing; others will require knowledge about solar energy and wind farms. Fortunately, the industry has a strong network of existing talent who can be retrained and refocused to meet these future challenges. Technology can play an important role in automating manual tasks to free up resources to focus on higher value tasks.

For example, digital as-builting technology has automated previously manual tasks and allowed resources to be directed towards more value-added tasks. Digital as-builting can use GPS and barcode scanning to automate the creation of digital maps in the field that can automate the process of updating the production GIS.

Without it, GIS analysts spend hours manually entering data into GIS for each project. With digital as-builting, this task is automated and allows them to spend more time performing high value analysis such as preparing the GIS for ADMS and other advanced tools.

New jobs will be created to meet tomorrow’s challenges – utility leaders should prepare for this now.

While considering the current and future construction workforce, one aspect that shouldn’t be ignored is the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on infrastructure. Social distancing is now a part of everyday life. While the nature of construction work requires presence in the field, technology can be used to reduce the need for field visits, reduce driving time and increase real-time awareness from the office.

Advancements in Digital Construction Management technology now allow for inspections to be performed remotely. An inspector can view construction progress in real time, review asset data, reports and photos, and communicate with field crews, contractors and project managers, all from a home or office. Confirming design changes, for example, can be done remotely through a guided workflow within a single technology platform, rather than communicating through phone calls or emails back and forth between the field and back office. This ability allows utilities to reduce time in the field and have greater inspection capacity per inspector. A hybrid work environment between on-site and remote tasks has the potential to shape the future of infrastructure development.

About the author: Shahar Levi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Locusview, a digital construction management platform. As a veteran of the Israeli Central Intelligence Research Unit, Shahar was part of a pioneering team that leveraged the use of GPS and mapping technologies into advanced intelligence applications. Shahar served as VP of Business Development at Nortec Group, where he led its acquisition to a multi-billion dollar global company.

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The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspected the Vogtle work to determine causes of needed remediation work for the electrical cable raceway system at Unit 3 (pictured earlier in the project phase). Southern Nuclear and lead utility Georgia Power announced the remediation work earlier this summer.

The NRC’s initial conclusion reported that its inspectors “found that Southern Nuclear did not adequately separate safety and non safety-related cables for reactor coolant pumps and equipment designed to safely shut down the reactor.

“They also found instances where the company did not identify and report construction quality issues related to the safety-related electrical raceway system and enter them into its corrective action program,” the federal regulatory release stated.

The NRC probe also found instances where Southern did not identify and report construction quality issues with the safety-related electrical raceway system nor enter those into a corrective action program. The findings could likely lead to increase oversight of the project which is already a year behind schedule and billions of dollars in cost overruns from original estimates.

“The conditions in the electrical cable raceway system, if left uncorrected, would prevent the plant from operating within the NRC’s regulations,” the release reads. “However, there is no increased risk to the public while Southern Nuclear corrects the conditions because there is no nuclear fuel in the reactor.”

Electrical cable raceway systems for commercial nuclear power plants are routed and designed to prevent a single event from disabling redundant safety-related equipment, according to the NRC. They consist primarily of conduits and cable trays designed to route and support the cables needed to ensure safety related equipment is powered to perform its safety functions.

Project developers had planned to commission Unit 3 into operation by late this year and Unit 4 in 2022 but recently adjusted those commissioning estimates back one year each.

Construction on Units 3 and 4 began in 2013 and have proceeded despite cost overruns, the bankruptcy of contractor Westinghouse (later replaced by EPC firm Bechtel) and the workforce delays brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

Once commercially operational, Vogtle 3 and 4 will be the first new nuclear reactors commissioned in the U.S. since TVA’s Watts Bar Unit 2 in 2015, which itself was the first in about three decades.