Asset management

Reducing of fuel and expendables costs is the most important factor to grow energy efficiency. The giant electricity consumers are the industrial plants and thus even few percent in savings can influence substantially on their bottom line. Our customizable professional system provides a set of solutions for power plant optimization allowing plants running at maximum efficiency while equilibrating the compromises between revenues, asset life cycle costs and emissions.

Reducing capital and operating costs via optimization

If your power plant face availability issues and your reaction to device failures is not fast enough, in this case you need Asset Management services which will assist to significantly improve the operation and reduce the operating expenses. The combination of our expertise and knowledge with our decades of implementation experience lead us to be able to meet the requirements of every object and to successfully perform their configuration, calibration, maintenance and management of all information during entire life cycle.

Through Power Plant Asset Management we assist you optimize your installed technologies both in the starting and the operation phases. PromFin Energo provide valuable asset information during the entire power plant life cycle: from the equipment and alternatives to full access and management of information and its integration into your economical working processes and IT infrastructure right through maintaining the requirements of commissioning, calibration and technical maintenance. Our role is to assist you both in planning and execution phases.

Benefits

Maximum asset information accessibility through remote access to plant documentation hub
Simple integration and management of information.
Fast, simple device substitution and integration for commissioning
Oriented audit process to calibration planning and automated certificate management
Enhanced plant performance using device diagnostics for improved activities of maintenance

Asset Management systems

The milestones of asset management are the Information management systems. These systems are designated to not only handle information archiving and retrieval but should offer also information analysis tools, comprising status monitoring, maintenance management, purchase and inventory control, predictive modeling, and decision-making including risk-evaluation software.

Presently, the information extracted via automation system from the power plant is mostly technical. Attainments about the influence of some technical information on the power plant in relation to commercial success of the plant is in the full responsibility of the experienced plant manager. If a power plant is operated on condition-based maintenance, where are not planned outages in regular intervals, but depending on the state of the plant, the success of this option is subordinated directly to the quality of the plant state evaluation.

However, even with a very precise plant state evaluation, there is place for enhancements. It is needed detailed data on how plant operation influences its general state. Only with this data, the plant manager has the full representation of his decisions results. In case we provide an instrument that not only determine the present plant status, but also give to the operator information about his actions influence on the future plant status, in this case can be taken the decision to dynamically operate the plant and earlier to initiate maintenance, or to run the plant in a balanced way and to extend the period until maintenance.

Asset information management

The information management for us starts with the production of equipment and continues during all the life cycle by attaching more and more information about the occurring events. Our asset information management solution provide easy to approach and up-to-date equipment information comprising: status, documents, calibration reports of the product.

Information linked to a particular asset like spare parts may be approached safely through a web browser or by the own process arrangement. The information based on events can be transferred to our system. Engaging our company in the power plant commissioning phase signifies that you have full access to assets information on your own visualizing devices. In the existing facilities, we survey/register your equipment base, perform all the necessary recordings and offer an analysis of risks which will determine potentially critical equipment and will suggest solutions.

Benefits

Quick access to important equipment information through online data transferring system
Continuous updating of equipment documentation and optimization of technical maintenance works
Rationalized auditing process through automated administration of information
Most efficient management of information due to integrated solutions
History records about equipment comprising tracking and changes collation due to modifications documentation information based on events

Risk evaluation and management

For taking into consideration the risk of experiencing an unplanned outage or the risk to be unable to connect to the grid after a plant shutdown, risk evaluation and evolution of the failure probability distribution of individual elements are addressed. These risk contemplations are inspissated as supplementary terms in the cost objective function and add a tunable term to penalize events via enhancement. Those terms may hinge on such characteristics like consumed equipment life, time from last shutdown, weather conditions, etc. The factors are tunable by the user as per any decision is affected by the market pressure and by the risk the asset manager or trader will take.

Let’s take as an example the option to perform power plant shutdown during the weekends. Even if it is clear that the power plant shutdown is the best option from economical view, the operator could decide not to assume the risk to be unable to provide the delegated power to the grid on Monday. This could spoil the week incomes but can be included as a risk term in the cost objective function. In this regard, risk considerations comprise subjective estimations by the user but are still formulated analytically.

We prpovide strategies for low-risk evolution for a wide range of products and systems developed to assure maximum return on investment while upgrading equipment availability and productivity.

Performance guarantee

For a power generation project the thermal performance guarantees are decisive for the long-term success of the project. The guaranteed parameters like power output, heat rate, efficiency, steam production, etc.; measure the financial success during the commercial operation phase of the project. Furthermore, the satisfaction or deficiencies in meeting the contractual guarantees is an valid way to appreciate the efforts from the engineering, construction and commissioning commands upon construction of the power plant. It is addressed to all of project types, either combined cycles, gas turbines, cogeneration plants, steam turbines, fossil plants, combustion engines, thermo-solar or wind projects.

The comparison to the guarantees should be a well-determined process in which the guaranteed performance parameters of the power plant are indicated in the contracts and guaranteed operating conditions. Within the period of estimation, it is impossible to recreate the exact guaranteed operating conditions, thus the use of correction constants and diagrams is needed to convert the measured to performance to collate to the guarantee performance.

Before performing the power plant performance test, methodologies, correction constants and diagrams and allowable deviations should be determined and agreed between the stakeholders. In this process the power plant owners, consultants and service providers make mutual efforts to negotiate the contractual frames, guarantee operating conditions and contractual duties.

Emission decrease

Emission trading have an amplifying and important role in energy markets. If the power plant emissions are under the level of its allocations, its management can sell the surplus of permits to third parties, which have more emissions than allocated. If the power plant emissions are higher than allocated, then it is needed to buy supplementary permits for the reason to not be penalized.

For the optimal decision the asset manager or trader needs to regard two important peculiarities:

Price levels and volatility.
Power plant technical characteristics.

Decision tools that are constituted from historic information (about past days, weeks or months) will not be able to grab these peculiarities and thus disadvantage the competitive position of the power plant. This is valid for combined cycle power plants, firing gas or oil as primary fuel, but is even more important for coal-fired plants because of the coal storage issues and the problems for the trader to unwind a coal position. Our Lifecycle Optimizer consider such effects by including supplementary terms, related to emission credits and penalizations, into the cost objective function. Let’s take an example of optimized load dispatch: power plant shutting down for a period of time based on trading of NOx emission. The effect on financial situation can be enormous, especially when emission permits need to be purchased and traded. The key of this perspective is the ability to take many peculiarities into the optimization and to count the effect on rentability, an impossible task for management without tool support.

Greenhouse gases emission have measurable economic importance and operators have a real motivation to reduce these emissions. Our PowPlant® ecological solutions lower emissions by the means of advanced process control (APC) which optimizes combustion, cuts down boiler startup times and enhances coordinated control of boiler-turbine and the frequency response of equipment.

Prolongation of asset lifetime

From an economic view, plant managers aim to balance their investment in new assets against risk, performance and downtime.

PowPlant® solutions for asset life cycle supervision offer continuous estimation of service life consumption of critical plant element. Supplementary optimization tools can schedule the most economical running of different generating block and trade off income from sales against life cycle costs.

This approach is also able of considering emission costs, e.g. more stringent CO2 requirements may turn mechanically functional plants to uneconomic ones. The benefits of these decision-support tools is the possibility to comprise plant ageing models to find the best suitable operational strategy from maintenance outages, particularly when running power plant in accordance with environmental constraints.

SERVICES

PROMFIN ENERGO

Quick menu

About Us
Services
Contacts

SUBSCRIBE: Get periodical updates and news