Recovery Best Practices

By:  Dan Tragresser

When a unit trips or experiences an event, the site will incur costs associated with the loss in production, regulatory penalties, and, if applicable, outage scope, hardware replacement, and the purchase of make-up power.  These costs can drive the priority of returning to service to quickly become the only priority.

With the reduction in staffing at power plants over the past 2 decades, many traditionally routine engineering and maintenance tasks have fallen by the wayside.  With limited resources, operations and engineering personnel must focus their time and efforts based on priority.  Quite often, keeping a unit online or quickly returning a unit to service will take priority over continuous improvement actions such as investigations and root cause analysis.

When a unit trips or experiences an event, the site will incur costs associated with the loss in production, regulatory penalties, and, if applicable, outage scope, hardware replacement, and the purchase of make-up power.  These costs can drive the priority of returning to service to quickly become the only priority.  Unfortunately, the review of event operational data, event precursors, and the collecting evidence through the unit disassembly very often fall below the priority of returning to service.  Collecting or re-creating evidence after the fact is nearly impossible.  This lack of priority often results in a lack of understanding of the root cause of the trip or event.  

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