Regulators blame mechanical wear for off-line California plants

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Regulators blame mechanical wear for off-line California plants HOUSTON, Feb. 2, 2001—Federal regulators who inspected out-of-service California electric plants did not find any evidence the audited companies scheduled maintenance or outages to influence prices, says a report released Friday. The staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reviewed about 60% of December outages after questions were raised about the high number of plants taken out-of-service in the midst of continuing threats of rolling blackouts, complaints about high prices, and fear the state's investor-owned utilities would not be able to pay their bills. Rather than manipulation, the regulators said the audit determined the outages occurred at generating plants that were 30-40 years old which were being operated at much higher rates than in previous years. The report attributed most of the problems to mechanical wear, including tube leaks and casing problems, turbine seal leaks and turbine blade wear, value failure, pump, and pump motor failures. Rather than deliberately keeping the plants out of service, auditors said the owners appeared to have taken whatever steps necessary to put the units back in service as soon as possible "by accelerating maintenance and incurring additional expenses." Moreover, inspectors said the outages and price movements didn't necessarily correlate. FERC auditors found Southern Energy Inc., now Mirant Corp., continued to run plants with boiler tube leaks at reduced capacity during the period. The company told inspectors units are taken out of service, if leaks become severe enough to create an environmental or safety hazard. With the generating plants running hard, maintenance needs and costs have also risen. At Reliant Energy Inc.'s Coolwater plant, auditors said maintenance costs rose to $23.1 million in 2000, up from $1.2 million in 1999, and $1 million in 1998. "This confirms what we've been saying from the very start—that the power producers have been working around-the-clock to help keep the lights on in California," said Jan Smutny-Jones, executive director of the California Independent Energy Producers. "Hopefully, today's FERC report will quiet those who have tried to blame the producers for the crisis, when in fact we have been and continue to be an important part of the solution to California's energy woes." He noted member companies have invested billions of dollars buying, modernizing, and building power plants in California, and are preparing to spend billions more to ensure that California can keep pace with the growing demand for electricity.

http://elp.pennnet.com/Articles/print_screen.cfm?PUBLICATION_ID=34&ARTICLE_ID=91427

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 02, 2001

Answers

"The report attributed most of the problems to mechanical wear, including ... casing problems, turbine seal leaks and turbine blade wear ..." I am an experienced turbomachinery design and analysis engineer, and if such problems were as rampant as the report says, I would be working on solving them, and not be unemployed. The turbomachinery manufacturers are in no panic to troubleshoot or solve any such problems, or to retrofit and uprate the turbines. This is my field of technical expertise, and demand for these skills I know, from personal knowledge in the job market daily, is weak. I believe that the ultimate report conclusion is correct, but that the true short term cause, Y2K computer bug problems in embedded control systems, is being covered up. However: It is definitely true that overdriving power plants will shorten life and increase failure rates over the longer term, which is an omen of worse (cascading) effects to come.

-- Robert Riggs (rxr.999@worldnet.att.net), February 03, 2001.

Robert, sorry to hearyou can't find work in a field supposedly suffering the ravages of time. Y2K a likely factor. Flashback to fall '99. Embedded chips like looking for needle in haystack. Policy of choice - fix on fail. Are we reaping that whirlwind? Likely. Spot checks indicate as many or more generators down for unsceduled as scheduled maintenance. Reliant Energy's Coolwater plant maintenace costs leap from $1.2m in '99 to $23m in'00. That's almost 20 fold! Very suspicious. Wrong kind of fix is in?

-- Warren Ketler (wrkttl.@earthlink.net), February 03, 2001.

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