Planned Maintenance at Holland Energy Park

Planned maintenance is a normal part of operating a power plant. Typically, turbine generators run thousands of hours per year with little downtime so that we can provide reliable electricity for our customers. With all that use, it’s important to have planned time to maintain, upgrade and service all our equipment.

In January 2024, Holland Energy Park (HEP) experienced its first major combustion turbine (CT) planned maintenance period. This required that we completely tear apart our two CTs to replace parts as needed, inspect everything and then put it all back together again. Other work during this outage included performing a minor inspection on our steam turbine and steam control valves and replacing the catalysts in our heat recovery steam generators to ensure our process continues to comply with our permitted emissions limits. While most planned maintenance requires a team of about 40 contractor personnel and less than two weeks to perform the work, this instance was significantly larger. The planned maintenance in January and February required 120 contractor personnel and teams working 12 hours shifts for four weeks straight to successfully complete.

Beginning a Year in Advance

Due to the size and complexity of the planned maintenance, work started a year in advance. This included economically sourcing parts and supplies with long lead times, reserving personnel for activities that require a wide range of skill sets and therefore a large number of people, and coordinating a complex sequence of tasks to minimize personnel downtime while prioritizing safety.

“Like most things, if you’re prepared, then you’re ahead of the game,” said Operations Supervisor Mark Richey. “It’s like orchestrating a play. Everyone has a part to play and everyone has to know what, when and how they’re coordinating with others to get the job done.”

BPW Preparations

Various departments and individuals had distinct roles in HEP’s maintenance and prep work to ensure success, including Operations, Maintenance, and Engineering. Holland BPW team members created work schedules, coordinated contractors and their work, worked long hours to accomplish tasks, and much more.

The operations team reviewed their lockout/tagout process to organize lockboxes that reflected plant layout and filled anticipated paperwork ahead of time. Doing so allowed for safe isolation of hazardous energy to protect all the workers while cutting the typical amount of time to perform a lockout/tagout in half.

Electric Production Maintenance

Our Electric Production Maintenance Planner played a critical role in keeping projects on schedule and communicating needs to the entire team. He made sure to update BPW teams and contractors both morning and evening on project progress, prioritized and assigned work for each component, ensured work orders had the proper confined space sheets, pre-job briefings, lockout tagout forms and much more.

The engineering team worked closely with Siemens, our turbine contractor, to troubleshoot turbine commissioning after maintenance was performed. Starting up, or commissioning, a turbine requires lots of evaluating and re-evaluating. Getting our three generators up and running perfectly took over a week to complete. “It’s high energy, high stress,” said Engineering Supervisor Grant Koster. “You want to be efficient while being safe and getting the job done well.”

Getting Better and Better

These extensive preparations paid off. Mike Radakovitz, Electric Production Superintendent, appreciated how well everyone worked together to make the planned maintenance period successful. “This has been the safest and best designed and executed planned maintenance that I’ve seen. It’s due, in part, to staff teamwork and efforts in the years leading up to the time improving procedures, work practices and modes of communication.”

With so many people from different places and companies, communication and collaboration were key aspects of the job. BPW team members trained outside contractors on our procedures and expectations to ensure each person stayed safe on the job.

Even with such a large crew of people, the planned maintenance went very smoothly. “Working on the floor with so many people, the communication couldn’t have been better,” said Maintenance Supervisor Fred Heiser. “People were great about sharing equipment, sharing safety concerns, sharing aisle space and workspaces. We ran a 24/7 operation for over four weeks, and no one got so much as a sliver.”

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