GE Hitachi Launches Outage Planning Analytics Solution To Optimize Nuclear Plant Turnaround Operations

GE Hitachi Launches Outage Planning Analytics Solution To Optimize Nuclear Plant Turnaround Operations

Energy from nuclear power plants accounts for roughly 10% of global supply, according to world nuclear association (WNA). It is also the world’s second largest source of low carbon energy, accounting for 29% in 2018. All this electricity comes from only 440 facilities spread across the globe. The operations and maintenance (O&M) of these assets are expensive, with WNA estimating them being 66% of the total operations costs. Since 56% of nuclear power plants are over 35 years old, it is imperative that O&M of these aging assets are optimized to ensure continuity of operations and competitiveness with newer facilities.

On 12^th May 2021, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and GE Digital jointly launched Outage Planning Analytics (OPA) solution to optimise nuclear plant operations. GEH is an alliance between GE and Hitachi that was founded in 2007 to provide advanced reactors and services for the nuclear industry. OPA assists operators of nuclear power plants to plan, schedule, and execute maintenance and refuelling outages. Operators are under pressure to increase the turnaround speed of these outages, as costs can run to over $1 million per day. It provides a single pane of glass view by integrating with a range of pillar applications that that nuclear plant. Instead of spending all of their time just trying to piece together what is happening in an outage, dashboards enable users to deep dive into work hour trends, work performance and stoppages, and they can leverage analytics to gain insights into the causes of delays.

OPA also includes insights on critical tasks that are due, along with a view into which of these activities can be performed on the same day, and the impact that the non-completion of these tasks will have on the project completion timeline. Further, OPA provides insights into work threads, not on the critical path, to alert to emerging risks.  Work threads not on critical path is a common reason for delays. To ensure critical tasks get completed in a timely manner, the view of tasks on and off the critical path get updated on a daily basis to reflect changes in the schedule and completed work. OPA with its provision of a single pane of glass view for planned outages and refuelling in the nuclear industry is also well placed to serve customers for turnaround optimisation in other industry verticals.