How Singapore’s utilities approach plant O&M

Some of Singapore’s leading power generators, as well as representatives from the market regulator, sat down with Asian Power and Ventyx to look at the challenges facing today’s operators in operations and maintenance.

The theme of the event was around enhancing visibility into the health of critical assets and improving reliability and lowering costs through predictive maintenance strategies.

A key theme of the roundtable was the need to do more to engage young engineers in power plant maintenance and operations through leveraging new technologies and the role that predictive maintenance systems can play in a power plant’s operations. Bernard Lee, the assistant chief executive of the Energy Market Authority, said that as the regulator they had to look at issues such as energy security and price competition. In Singapore, where 90 percent of the market for generation is now fueled by gas, security of supply remains a key concern.

Ventyx EVP Global Sales Daryl Rolley said the issue of asset health in aging infrastructure was particularly acute in the developed world. “There is not enough money for what the plant operators want to do, and every operator has the problem of how to stretch the maintenance dollars. Twenty-five years ago maintenance was time-based, and each asset had a manual program of inspections. Nothing was digitized, nor was it in real time. Now the technology of condition-based maintenance allows us to run a business in a different way. Rather than time-based maintenance, we can get information and do maintenance based on conditions at the time, as well as on conditions that are trending toward issues in the future. This is true predictive maintenance.”

Rolley noted how consumer devices such as personal health trackers which linked to apps on an iPhone, and the home digital device NEST, which was acquired by Google, are influencing the way plant operators should look at running their systems.
“With real-time and digital monitoring rather than time-based maintenance, you can focus on what needs to be looked into and not replace an asset that doesn’t need to be replaced.”

On a system-wide level, giving information into the health of a country’s energy infrastructure was important, said the Energy Market Authority’s Bernard Lee. “We have different types of data collected from different types of businesses, but we want to reduce duplication from different sources and be able to make more sense of the data,” added Lee.

This holistic approach is key to enabling true predictive asset health strategies. It’s about much more than just ensuring equipment uptime; it’s an enterprisewide strategy for intelligently managing and coordinating assets, people, technology, and operations to meet the goals of the larger organization – whether that involves one power plant or a full generation fleet.