ABB leading the way in quality and effiency

The priority of Asia’s power plant operators have been reshaped by surging fuel prices and tight supply of replacement parts, says ABB Vice President Frenk Withoos, who oversees the company’s operations for Power Systems in the South Asia Pacific region. It is a dramatic turnaround from the situation just two years back when Asian Power last caught up with Mr. Withoos. At the time, Chinese equipment vendors were making serious inroads in Asia and fuel prices were low, replacement parts in plentiful supply and operators were little concerned with efficiency.

Fast forward to today and you have a very different situation, says Withoos, who adds that plant operators need to consider efficiency more than before to get the most out of fuel and that a cheaper capital cost for a plant doesn’t necessarily mean a cheaper operating cost. So what of the Chinese vendors who have been asserting themselves in the market?

"What we are hearing is that the Chinese are very aggressive in the market with their comparatively inexpensive solutions. The operators are also finding it a very lucrative option to have far lower capital cost. It is surely putting thrust on the secondary equipment suppliers like us, to take a call and find out measures to provide solutions matching the market price levels."

Mr. Withoos commenting on the issues of plant performance says: "We truly believe that second level and third level equipment have a major role to play in deciding the performance of plant operation. The balance of plant accounts to a considerable portion of power consumption drawn directly from the plant. You can imagine every bit of energy saved here can add up to a few megawatts which an operator can sell to the grid.

In an era where fuel prices have doubled, that puts a lot of strain on an operator’s financials, power producers realise that they should get what they are paying for and secondly they have lesser problems in maintaining and operating the plant. And finally, every bit of efficiency an operator can wring out of operations will have a big impact on the bottom line." So how do you react to your customer’s high expectations?

"We respect the expectations of our customers. We used to be turnkey power plant suppliers. Though we have sold off the main equipment but we retain the experts with us and have wealth of knowledge on how a power plant works. Utilising our knowledge, we help our customers with the most appropriately sized Electrical Balance of Plant solution.

Here I would emphasise more when I say appropriate size because most of the times we have found that plant operators spend a lot for equipment being oversized, 20 to 30% over sizing is very common. You can see that the customer doesn’t only pay more for oversized equipment but also has to spend more to run this equipment, which hits his financials."

Withoos adds: "We also have developed solutions which are focused on improving the plant performance. We have a package called ‘Optimax’ which specifically guides the plant engineers to identify the areas where the equipment performance can be improved to maximise overall plant performance. With it you can save on your operating costs."

In fact it is savings like these and others that can be found with an energy audit that have become a large part of ABB’s business in Asia. Says Withoos:"There are more and more requests from developing countries for energy audits. As I mentioned earlier, we have the wealth of knowledge on power plants, this is I think one of the key services that we as ABB can bring to our customers. A few of the services provided include Energy Management Master Plan, Energy Strategy Development, System Surveys and Opportunity Identifications. As a deliverable not to forget, we live with our commitment to ensure ABB delivers quality to customer’s expectation. And I feel, we have been successful to do so."

Another key innovation at ABB is in providing modular container solutions consisting of fully tested major parts of the automation and electrical equipments for power plants. This containerized solution allows full integration test of the electrical and control equipment at factory instead of at site and includes cabling, electrical and control functionalities and optimization of turbines. The containers just need to be connected to prepared interfaces on site to reduce precious assembling and commissioning time.

Says Withoos, " We have standard container solutions for some OEMs based on certain size of turbines. This will shorten the commissioning time, increase the reliability and reduce the overall costs.

We see more requests for fast track projects due to high demand and these pre-engineered, pre-designed, pre-assembled and pre-tested solutions are essential to achieve tight schedules."

Being a single-source supplier, ABB provides all engineering, assembling, testing, and installation and commissioning services for the supply of the modules.

What clients also ask us a lot about is reliability, and how they can improve it in their plants.

There’s one example where one main step-up distribution transformer failed. Of course, one of the units stopped. This is costing them around $400,000 every day. The general tendency in a few countries when it comes to maintenance is if it’s not broken, don’t touch it. Now that kind of mindset is changing slowly.

So a company can take the short-term route and not touch their equipment until it is broken, or use a preventive maintenance programme, which is in terms of cost, nothing compared to what you could lose everyday with downed equipment." One of ABB’s solutions, says Withoos, is to X-ray parts to see if there is any internal damage so that the plant can keep operating."If a plant or unit fails, it’s big news.

And right now a lot of plants are running at maximum capacity, because we all want to squeeze out as much as possible. That’s where we are providing more solutions for preventive maintenance, inspection, and early issue identification. So now that’s why more companies are coming to us for advice on how to make their equipment more efficient and reliable. "

And with fuel prices remaining high and supplies tight it looks like Withoos and his team will be busy improving the efficiency and reliability of Asia’s power plants.