Can you describe your role within MD&A and the types of projects you support most often?
I lead the global sales & marketing team within MD&A. In this role, I help connect customers with the technical resources, service offerings, and project support they need across our major service lines. Much of my work involves understanding customer priorities, identifying operational or reliability challenges, and coordinating with internal teams to ensure MD&A delivers practical, timely, and technically sound solutions. Relationship management is also a significant part of my role.
Where do you see operators most frequently underestimating risk in their equipment?
In the gas turbine space, I frequently see operators underestimate risk by not properly calculating factored hours and factored starts when determining maintenance intervals for capital parts, particularly combustion and hot gas path components. Many customers rely primarily on actual hours and starts; however, not all operating hours and starts have the same impact on component life. Depending on how a unit is operated, certain conditions can either shorten or extend the life of critical components. Accurately calculating maintenance intervals helps reduce the likelihood of degradation-related failures, improves reliability and availability, maximizes the useful life of capital components, and can significantly reduce repair costs over time.
Steam turbines are being cycled far more frequently today than they were in the past. Historically, units designed for peaking service were built to different standards because the repeated starts, stops, and load changes created additional mechanical and thermal stress. Many modern units, however, are designed around assumptions more closely aligned with base-load operation. As a result, increased cycling can significantly reduce component life. We are seeing the effects of creep and thermal fatigue drive earlier replacement of major components that, under prior operating profiles, may have lasted for the life of the machine.
What are the most critical inspection points in steam turbine maintenance today?
The most critical inspection points include main steam valves, control valves, intercept valves, reheat stop valves, and related valve assemblies because of their direct impact on both operation and protection of the unit. These components play a key role in safe startup, shutdown, load control, and emergency response. If they are not properly inspected and maintained, they can contribute to reliability concerns, reduced operating flexibility, and potential protection-system issues.
Additionally, last stage bucket wear is an important element to pay attention to. Buckets are a long lead item, typically. Owners should have a plan to anticipate replacement of these capital parts and to inventory them before they are faced with a forced or extended outage.
What components or systems typically drive the most outages or performance loss in gas turbines?
For planned outages, capital-parts maintenance intervals are often the primary driver, particularly combustion and hot gas path components. If those intervals are not accurately calculated and managed, customers may either replace components too early or run them too long, increasing the risk of forced outage exposure.
For forced outages, inadequate maintenance practices can lead to foreign object damage, along with other preventable mechanical issues. Performance loss is often tied to insufficient inlet-air-system maintenance, fuel quality concerns, or inadequate fuel conditioning, all of which can affect output, heat rate, emissions, and overall unit responsiveness.
What are the most common generator issues that lead to forced outages or derates?
The most common generator issues that lead to forced outages or derates generally fall into field-ground and stator-ground categories.
Field grounds may result from issues such as main-lead failures, carbon buildup on collector rings, or jumper and coil separation within the winding. These conditions can compromise rotor reliability and, if not identified early, may require immediate unit shutdown or forced repair.
Stator grounds can be caused by bar failures, moisture intrusion, clip leaks, or hydrogen leaks. These issues can create significant operational risk and may lead to derates, forced outages, or more extensive repairs if not addressed through effective monitoring, testing, and inspection practices.
When a customer brings MD&A into a project early, what difference does that typically make in outcomes?
When MD&A is brought into a project early, it typically improves planning, scope definition, schedule certainty, and overall outage execution. Early involvement allows our teams to identify potential risks before work begins, align the technical approach with the customer’s operating goals, and ensure that parts, tooling, labor, and contingency plans are properly considered. This reduces surprises in the field and helps customers make better decisions before cost or schedule impacts become more difficult to manage.
What does “successful outage execution” look like in your experience?
Successful outage execution means the work is completed safely, on schedule, within the agreed scope, and with the unit returned to service in a reliable operating condition. It also means the customer understands what was found, what was corrected, and what should be monitored going forward. A successful outage is not simply about finishing the work; it is about reducing future risk and giving the customer confidence in the condition of the equipment.
What metrics or indicators matter most when assessing unit reliability?
The most important starting point is understanding the root cause of any turbine trip, forced outage, or failure event. Reliability and availability are related, but they are not the same. Reliability focuses on unplanned events that prevent the unit from operating as intended, while availability takes a broader view of all hours the unit is unavailable to produce megawatt-hours, including both planned and unplanned downtime.
Key indicators include bearing vibration, bearing and drain temperatures, wheel-space temperatures, exhaust thermocouple spreads, emissions performance, and overall thermal performance. Monitoring these parameters consistently provides a practical view of machine health and helps identify developing issues before they become reliability events.
One area that is often underestimated is the importance of instrumentation, valve, and inlet guide vane calibrations. Accurate instruments and properly calibrated control components are essential to reliable operation. If the unit is receiving inaccurate data or responding through poorly calibrated components, even a mechanically healthy machine can operate outside of its intended range.
Tracking operating parameters to confirm that the unit remains within design specifications is vital to long-term reliability. However, the quality of that analysis depends on the accuracy of the instruments collecting the data. Good maintenance practices must therefore include not only the major rotating equipment, but also the supporting instrumentation and controls that allow operators to understand actual machine condition.
If you could give plant operators one key takeaway about equipment reliability, what would it be?
The key takeaway is that a power plant operates as a system, not as a collection of isolated machinery components. Each component affects the performance and reliability of other components. Understanding how the complete system functions is essential to recognizing when an individual component requires attention. A well-structured and comprehensive maintenance plan helps reduce the likelihood that a single component issue will develop into a broader system-level problem.
