Q: Could you briefly explain your role, involvement and experience with regards to this seminar?
Matthew MacDonald (MM): I am a rotating plant engineer at SSE, dealing mainly with the integrity of gas turbines within our generation fleet.
Daiki Shishido (DS): I am working for business development team in UK office as an engineer. I am responsible for all technical issue relating new business, especially for gas turbine.
George Norrie(GN): As Technical Director of Scotia Energy Ltd I was responsible for the initial idea and scoping, design and implementation of the project.
Damon Robinson (DR): As the Europe Region Application Engineering Leader, I lead a team of Gas Turbine Combined Cycle Engineers tasked with supporting conversions, modifications and upgrades on the GE Heavy Duty installed base. This encompasses projects from component level obsolescence and reliability upgrades to full plant repowers and retrofits.
Q: What are the main engineering challenges facing the industry at the moment and what are the most common issues you hear from colleagues?
DS: The main engineering challenge is performance improvement. The most common issue is that what colleagues are facing, is too high work load.
MM: The ageing of the UK’s generation fleet and the increasingly important requirement for gas turbines to be highly responsive and flexible.
DR: Majority of the installed base was built and designed for base load duty. Challenges for our customers and are how to adapt plants now for uncertain operations and to remain competitive in extreme cyclic and heavily renewable energy penetrated landscapes.
GN: The main challenge for engineers working in the energy field is the decarbonising of energy systems. The technology to decarbonise electricity has progressed using renewables but replacing fuel for heating and power is a greater problem. The lack of skilled experienced engineers, technicians and tradesmen is a major problem especially for the implementation and growth of new technology solutions.
Q: What key topics are you excited to speak about?
GN: As an engineer working in energy systems for over 40 years I am passionate about energy efficiency and system integration. Most energy systems are inefficient because they are not considered as a group but as individual elements such as lighting, heating and power.
MM: The overhaul of existing assets to ensure that they are suitable for future operation within the UK energy market.
DS: Hydrogen technology.
DR: How GE’s combined cycle products and services can improve our customer’s profitability via efficiency and flexibility improvements in line with market dynamics.
Q: Who else are you most interested in hearing from on the programme?
MM: I am interested to hear about the blading redesigns being done by SoftInWay.
DR: Very interested in obtaining customer perspectives on how our products are performing, what they’ve done to make this better and where we need to be focussing our attentions for improvement.
DS: I am interested in hearing from Damon Robinson.
GN: David Graham: Technical Consultant, Uniper Technologies
Q: What are your top tips when tackling a new assessment?
DR: Early collaboration with our application engineers and our customer technical teams. Sure, our respective commercial teams can often drive the agenda, but we find the best results are achieved when our customer’s engineering, operations and maintenance teams are part of our offering specification process with our engineering team. This allows us to understand the plant’s challenges and optimize our solutions to get the most optimum plant outcomes.
GN: The top tips are:
- Do your homework.
- Build the right team.
- Keep the project flexible.
- Do not base your outcomes on a single technology if possible.
- Try to use proven systems as the basis of the project with an element of new technology. New technology can be risky but can add value and provide a route to future progress.
MM: Never eliminate any potential root cause until you have established yourself that it’s not to blame. Don’t assume that someone else has already investigated it, no matter how obvious.
DS: Step back to look at the big picture of a new assignment and make careful preparation.
Q: Why is it important for engineers to join this seminar?
DR: As an ex CCGT Engineering Manager these types of events allow engineers to remain contemporary within the industry and to understand market dynamics and what the OEMs and their peers are focussing on in their current activities…..not just UK based…but from Europe and Global perspective too.
MM: So that they can share knowledge with a wide variety of gas turbine users, manufacturers and consultants, who they wouldn’t normally come into contact with.
GN: This CHP/thermal storage /electrical storage technology could be one of the major practical and economic routes to de-carbonise heat and power systems for buildings and industry. These systems if sized, designed, installed and operated properly are very cost effective and low carbon. Much better than heat pumps when there is a heat and electrical load.
DS: This topic provides future possibility of gas turbine role with renewable energy together with digital solution.
Q: What developments are you most interested in for the future and why?
DR: I’m interested in understanding the latest views on how combined cycle and simple cycle technology will be used in the future energy mix and what fuel flexibility options, load flexibility, emissions targets, outage intervals, operational characteristics and maintenance practices will be needed to be successful in the future.
MM: New nuclear power stations, particularly breeder reactors, concentrated solar thermal power plants, gas turbine-solar co-generation schemes and nuclear fusion research. I believe that these technologies have the biggest potential to reduce the energy sector’s impact on the global climate.
DS: I am interested in Hydrogen technology since it is one of the solutions for a sustainable future.
GN: The de-regulation of the electrical supply market and implementation of affordable load aggregation would encourage greater small scale on site local generation with the ability to sell electricity to the grid and heat to local heating networks. This would increase generation efficiency and reduce carbon emissions across the UK.