Ramping up outage efficiency with an innovative approach
A customer in the Midwest turned to GE to manage a complex outage to restore its 7FA.03 gas turbines to their previous efficiency and output.
Overview
GE and the customer worked together to complete an extensive outage to help the utility continue providing power to local residents.
The challenge
Our customer was gearing up for a planned outage at its generating plant. The utility’s four 7FA.03 gas turbines, which are used as peaker units in simple cycle mode, were about to reach their 900 starts limit and needed to be serviced before they could be put back online. The customer provides electricity to close to 7 million residents, so it was crucial to complete the outage quickly—and effectively.
The solution
It was a complex hot gas path (HGP) outage with a broad scope, but GE arrived at the plant with some new solutions. Based on previous outage experience, GE’s team had developed a new—and now standard—outage procedure to help improve efficiency and save time.
Outcomes
4 7FA.03
gas turbines
8-day
outage
6 days
faster than traditional outage
The outage process improvements required both up-front and real-time planning. Some of the key hardware and components, which would usually be assembled during the outage, were preassembled and ready to be installed at the beginning of the outage, which resulted in more “hands on deck” during key portions of the project. In addition, the team of engineers made a few changes to the sequencing in the process of disassembling and reassembling the unit, which helped reduce unnecessary rework and man hours.
This outage also employed a new GE enhancement called “Live Outage”, which replaces a previously manual process with a more modern one to help improve the safety, quality and efficiency of onsite field execution. While traditional outages rely on a trailer full of paper documentation and drawings, GE’s Live Outage brings all that knowledge and project tracking to a touchscreen-based, digitized platform that includes a large display screen on site and tablets for the field execution team. With drawings, videos, step-by step procedures and checklists, and live feedback from a centralized GE knowledge management system available on screen, outage team members have everything they need at their fingertips—literally.
As a result of these process and technology improvements, the team was able to complete the outage in just 8 days—6 days faster than the average HGP, with no safety incidents.
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