COMPETITIVE POWER COLLEGE CURRICULUM
Monday, December 7, 2009
   
8-Hour course registration fees include workshop materials,
certificate of completion, lunch, coffee breaks and CPC Attendee Reception


CPC 301    Capital Project Analysis at Power Plants

Date:        Monday, December 7, 2009    Time:    8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Room:        N103                Cost:    $500.00

Instructor
John M. Hynes, Partner, Excidian LLC

Who Should Attend
Positions whose tasks relate directly or indirectly to plant operations / maintenance or require financial knowledge to either understand or contribute to capital investment decisions will benefit.  Job titles of professionals who have taken this course include Plant Managers, Supervisors, Team Leaders and Engineers. 

Participants should have some business and financial acumen gleaned from academic courses or on-the-job experience.

Course Overview and Objective
This one-day course has two modules.  They are:

I.    Financial Statements – Participants review how the three major financial statements are constructed. The Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement are studied using short, interactive exercises to demonstrate how routine business transactions impact each statement and to show how the statements relate to one another.  

II.    Capital Investment Decision Analysis - Participants review Present Value; Net Present Value; Internal Rate of Return; and Weighted Average After-Tax Cost of Capital.  A customized spreadsheet model is used to perform valuation exercises for power plant projects. Participants make decisions about inputs that ultimately drive the decision of whether to allocate capital to the projects.

Course Highlights

• Customized. The Capital Investment module is customized for professionals making capital allocation decisions in power plants.
• Hands-on learning.  Much of the day is spent working in large and small groups. Bring your notebook computer to work on the project valuation exercises.
• Interactive.  Participants are encouraged to ask questions often and whenever they come to mind.
• Relevant to current events.  Course facilitator, John M. Hynes, MSEE, MBA relates teaching points to current industry news.
• Primary learning goal.  The primary purpose of this course is to provide participants with the financial knowledge to analyze power plant projects and to make business decisions that are in the best interests of their company.
• Participants exit this course understanding the importance of applying financial analysis to accurately analyze capital projects.

CPC 302    Essential Practices for Outage Management

Date:        Monday, December 7, 2009    Time:    8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Room:        N107                Cost:    $500.00

Instructor
Rob Shepard, The Energy Group

Who Should Attend
Personnel seeking training or are involved in the planning, coordination and management of power plant outages should attend this course.  This may include supervisors, engineers, planners, schedulers, superintendents, and managers.

Course Overview and Objective
This course will provide an overview of the lifecycle of outages and in-depth understanding of the tools, practices, and procedures that should be utilized in the planning, coordination, and managing power plant maintenance outages.  There will be more focus on planned maintenance outages, however, the planning and coordination of emergency outages will be covered as well.
This is an opportunity to learn the tools, practices, procedures and strategies to enable management to minimize risk and maximize results from the next outage.  New and upcoming outage planners and managers will gain a broad and deep understanding of the outage process.  Seasoned outage personnel will gain best practices they can implement in their own outage process.  For those plants and utilities without a formal outage process, this course will provide the tools, practices and procedures needed to implement the outage process at your own facilities.

Course Highlights

• Outage Lifecycle
• Organization & Leadership Tools
• Outage Planning Techniques
• Condition Assessment
• Strategies to control scope and cost
• Strategies to manage outage effectiveness
• Project Management & Engineering
• Integrated Outage Schedule
• Outage Execution
• Shutdown and Startup Coordination
• Contractor Management
• Material Management

CPC 303    Turbine Generator Failures:  Prediction and Prevention

Date:        Monday, December 7, 2009    Time:    8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Room:        N108                Cost:    $500.00

Instructors
William G. Moore, P.E., Director, Product Line Development, National Electric Coil (NEC) and Stephen R. Reid, P.E., President, TG Advisers Inc.

Who Should Attend
Power plant managers, supervisors, and engineers. Suppliers of Turbine - Generator components and services.   Turbine - Generator consultants and inspection/test organizations. Insurers of Power Generation Equipment frequently attend the course, also.  Anyone in the Power Industry that wants a deeper understanding of steam and gas turbines, generators, and why these machines fail.

Course Overview and Objective
This intensive, full day course describes major failure modes that steam and gas turbines, as well as generators, experience.  Methods for prevention of these failures will also be presented.    An understanding of these failure modes, and how to prevent them, will help plant personnel avoid costly forced outages.  New issues on increased unit cycling and turndown will also be discussed along with the pitfalls of associated equipment issues..   The most current industry problems and failure modes are presented, along with many recent case histories.  Time is allotted for course attendees to discuss their own case studies and establish next step options for failure prevention.  Each participant receives a comprehensive set of course notes, updated with the latest industry issues, as well as recent published papers by the authors.

Course Highlights
The AM session covers Steam and Gas Turbines. Major topics include:

• Affects of increased cycling and equipment turndown on mature turbine and generator assets.
• Diagnosing and prevention of blade failures including a review of industry failure statistics, blade excitation sources, common failure mechanisms, root cause failure analysis procedures, plant operation and maintenance considerations, and key diagnostic tools
• Common steam turbine rotor and disc cracking concerns including corrosion, creep and fatigue cracking mechanisms, forging concerns, weld repair options and associated case studies
• Overview of combustion turbine failure mechanisms including vibration, thermal-mechanical interactions, affects of cycling, and associated case studies
• Life management programs and application to the aging steam turbine generator fleet
• Participant case studies

The PM session covers Generators.  Major topics include:

• Overview of generator design, operation and component description
• Diagnosis and prevention of generator rotor problems, including rotor winding shorts, grounds, copper distortion, balance problems, rotor thermal sensitivity, forging evaluation, retaining ring stress corrosion cracking, pole to pole crossover failures, J-strap fatigue, rotor dovetail cracking, with many case studies
• Description of rotor testing including megger testing (insulation resistance), pole drop, hi-potential, flux probe, stationary and running impedance
• Diagnosis and prevention of generator stator problems, including stator winding grounds, turn to turn shorts, partial discharge, end winding vibration, stator core iron shorting and melting, core looseness, crevice corrosion cracking on water cooled coils.  More recent industry issues include partial discharge and spark erosion damage on large, high voltage, air-cooled generators.  Many case studies.
• Description of stator testing including EL CID, core loop & thermography, insulation resistance, winding resistance, power factor, high frequency surge test, vacuum decay, pressure decay, capacitance testing, with many case studies
• Over 200 full color photos of failures and fixes.
• Participant case studies

CPC 304    Lost Efficiency:  Finding “Low Hanging Fruit”

Date:        Monday, December 7, 2009    Time:    8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Room:        N111                Cost:    $500.00

Instructor
Greg Alder, Senior Consultant and Trainer, True North Consulting LLC

Who Should Attend
•       Engineers responsible for power plant performance.
•       Test Engineers responsible for testing plant equipment.
•       Experienced Engineers who are looking for new ideas to find lost generating in plants.
•       Supervisors who want to develop and implement an effective thermal performance program.
•       Design Engineers who desire to understand how their work can affect plant performance.
•       Operators who want to operate a plant to achieve maximum plant efficiency.

Course Overview and Objective
Right now, you can find losses in your plant to increase electric output and reduce fuel consumption and emissions!  The quicker you find them, the more money you make!  This short course focuses on finding the “low hanging fruit” in generating plants.  Although the focus is on fossil plant applications, there are many topics that apply and benefit nuclear and combined cycle plants.  This course is a must for those seeking to improve plant performance.

Instruction is based on using “cookbook” mini-sessions in a workshop environment with actual plant scenarios.  These cookbook tutorials provide the user with a step-by-step recipe to find lost generation in power plants.

Additionally students are provided with copies of these cookbooks in an easy to understand tutorial format that the attendees can use and apply when they return from the training course.  A CD will be provided full of tools, applications and ideas.

Monitoring a power plant’s thermal performance requires talents from various disciplines combined with practical ability and a good understanding of thermodynamic principles.  True North Consulting brings these attributes together by combining excellent theoretical knowledge with significant plant experience.  True North brings over 25 years of applying thermodynamic theory and procedures to increase plant generation and recover lost generation and heat rate.

Course Highlights

• Getting Started.  The essential elements of a thermal performance program.
• Background. Short refresher on basic thermodynamic principles and how they are employed in monitoring plant efficiency.
• LOPA.  Find out what is meant by a LOPA, a common problem with thermal performance analyses that can stop you cold.
• Speed and Accuracy.  How to streamline data to reduce repetition and shorten the time to perform analysis.
• What Tools Do I Have?  How to use various tools to quickly find a thermal performance issue.
• Preventing Errors.  How not to be fooled by instrumentation or plant historian problems.
• Communicating.  How to effectively interface with Operations, Maintenance and Work Control.
• Reports.  The fundamentals of reporting aspects from daily generation to industry performance indicators.
• Prioritizing.  Monitoring and prioritizing critical performance parameters.
• Finding “Low Hanging Fruit”.  Actual step-by-step plant examples presented in interactive workshop sessions.