...and certainly not what you want. But during an emergency sometimes you need a rotor—often due to issues that are many times beyond our control (weather and natural disasters, human error, equipment issues, or equipment damage).
But keep in mind, these are expensive inventory items, have specific unit design nuances, and configurations differences are important to understand for safe operation of the gas turbine. Even with these nuances, GE is typically able to work to cover the bulk of the FA fleet with assets in our refurbished rotor pool.
Let’s go through a step-by-step process:
GE makes our best effort to hold a safety rotor pool of assets for customers to use in the event of an emergency issue. It can be costly to hold a big inventory, and occasionally the lead times for some of the parts can be significant (for example nickel wheels have over a year lead time!).
We evaluate the size and reliability of each fleet by framesize. This is a general approximation that is mostly driven by the size of the fleet and our experience of needing rotors, as well as knowing that issues outside of our control happen at power plants.
Based on this fleet assessment, we try to hold an appropriate amount of rotors somewhere in our work in process to reduce the lead time of the return to service for operators.
