The water industry faces unprecedented cost pressures driven by supply chain inflation, high interest rates, and rising energy prices. In this challenging environment, leaders must find innovative ways to reduce their reliance on the grid and maximise their energy generation capabilities. This article explores strategies for optimising energy production from existing wastewater assets.

1. Dynamic Production Planning: Aligning Generation with Business Goals

Effective production planning goes beyond simply setting annual targets and run rates. It requires a dynamic approach that adapts to changing circumstances and aligns with the asset strategies. The approach should encompass three-time horizons:

  • Operational (1-2 weeks): Focus on maximising generation based on current operating conditions, considering factors like recent breakdowns, weather events, or staffing levels.
  • Tactical (2-12 weeks): Optimise generation for cost-efficiency. This involves tactics like importing sludge to utilise spare capacity or changing maintenance regimes.
  • Strategic (3-18 months): Align energy generation with long-term business goals. Consider future capacity needs, planned overhaul schedules, and strategic initiatives such as infrastructure upgrades or expansions.

Tactical planning offers the greatest opportunity to enhance performance. However, this medium-term horizon is often sacrificed to resolving near-term operational issues. Protecting time and headspace for tactical planning reduces knee-jerk reactions and is crucial for embedding continuous improvement and sustaining generation gains. Ignore tactical planning at your peril.

The key to dynamic planning is not to focus on site-specific targets established (often long ago) during financial business planning. Production planning activity should concentrate on maximising output across the entire organisation. This doesn’t mean that local targets are not helpful – they are. Site teams need to understand what they are striving to achieve, but planning at the system level often requires sub-optimising local plans for the greater good.

2. Proactive Synchronised Asset Maintenance: The Foundation of Reliable Generation

Asset availability is paramount for consistent energy generation. While the strategies for enhancing asset availability are well known:

  • Adherence to Planned Maintenance Schedules: Prevent breakdowns
  • Effective Reactive Maintenance: Minimise downtime

Many organisations face significant maintenance backlogs due to accrued technical debt and capacity constraints, which impact their ability to maximise generation. We explored these challenges and tactics for creating additional capacity to help you burn down the backlogs with an industry-leading expert.

{Link to Maintenance Webinar Synopsis}

In addition to good maintenance practices, there are also some additional tools we can use to maximise generation:

How we perform planned maintenance can have a significant impact on performance. For example, CHP overhauls can often take several weeks to complete for large engines, resulting in a substantial loss of generation. The costs of the overhaul are frequently insignificant when compared to lost generation.

Using a Lean Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) approach, you can significantly reduce the time it takes to complete an overhaul, reducing asset downtime and minimising capacity losses. In a recent example, the overhaul cycle time was reduced by 54%.

When you perform planned and non-emergency planned work, it can also impact generation. Scheduling digestor maintenance when CHPs are offline for overhauls is an example of minimising the impact of downtime resulting from maintenance. Equally, this approach can be used for all maintenance activities that result in consequential generation asset downtime.

Effective tactical planning allows you to align maintenance activities with times that minimise the downside risk to generation. It facilitates careful coordination of activities between production planners, P&S functions, and field operational and maintenance managers.

3. Integrated Management System: Breaking Down Silos for Continuous Improvement

Data is abundant in today’s utilities, but data alone doesn’t guarantee improvement. The key is an integrated management system that brings cross-functional teams together and empowers them with the insights to drive continuous improvement. Focus on these areas to create a more cohesive and effective management system:

Develop KPIs that Provide Comprehensive Energy Insights: Move beyond isolated metrics and create a holistic view of energy performance.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is used in world-class manufacturing approaches to determine how well a process performs and can be readily applied to energy generation.

  • Availability: Actual run time for the CHP versus planned run time
  • Performance: Actual throughput (KwH) v theoretical max throughpu
  • Quality: Actual KwH Generated per cubic gas v theoretical maximum

OEE provides clear insights into the key factors impacting energy generation performance, enabling you to focus your improvement activities on the ones that will yield the greatest improvements.

Collaboration with transparent decision processes: Implement well-defined procedures for data analysis, problem-solving, and decision implementation to ensure everyone is working toward the same goals. Cross-functional meetings are crucial to driving collaboration, and clear Terms of Reference, decision rights, and standard performance metrics enable teams to work toward a common goal.

By embracing these approaches, leaders can accelerate generation performance. Dynamic production planning ensures alignment with business goals while adapting to changing conditions. Proactive asset maintenance maximises uptime and reduces costly breakdowns. Finally, an integrated management system promotes collaboration and empowers data-driven decisions, driving continuous improvement and unlocking the full energy potential.

If you would like to discover how Reson8 can accelerate your energy generation performance, email Dean at dean.wheeler@reson8.group, and he will arrange a call.