If I can offer one piece of advice up front, it’s this: Short-term focus will limit your options during planning.
Typically, we see operators start planning 3 years in advance of needing to install a solution. This allows a lot of flexibility to evaluate different types of options. There are a few factors that influence the timing of needing a rotor solution. The main drivers are the number of hours and starts run per year. As we have seen the 7F gas powered plants moving toward a more cyclic operation, this can move the timing of rotor maintenance in or out in time.
Once the operator understands when a rotor solution is needed, it is helpful to analyze the long-term plans for the plant. In some cases, there may be some uncertainty in this area. However, in other cases the plant target year can be defined as the Power Purchase Agreement term or a plant life extension. Understanding how long you need to run your rotor solution helps you make sure you pick an option that gives you the right amount of rotor life, not too much or too little.
Other things to consider when planning for rotor maintenance include outage window or the need to address multiple gas turbines. Many operators face limitations on outage duration which does not make it easy to send their rotor to the shop for maintenance. In these cases we see most operators do a rotor swap with a new or refurbished rotor. Other times when there are multiple gas turbines to consider we can use a refurbished rotor asset as a seed and rotate it through the fleet of gas turbines.
