PANEL DISCUSSION: The Future of O&M

• Outline the present and projected O&M challenges in US wind industry
• Look at the growing importance of condition monitoring and other technologies
• With the amount of installed capacity growing exponentially, what is expected to happen to ongoing maintenance work?

Speakers: TBC

Regulatory requirements: now and into the future

• Get to grips with the changing landscape in grid interconnection requirements at both a federal and state level and understand how this can have an impact on new and existing wind farms
• Discover what the requirements on wind farm communications, telemetry, forecasting are and why it is import you are aware of this
• Have a look at what solutions there are available for existing wind farms so that you can become compliant
• A look into the future – get an understanding of the new regulations that may come in as penetration grows even higher

Kuru Kuruvilla, Senior Product Manager, Renewable Systems Product Line

GE Energy

Health and Saftey requirments – OSHA is catching up

• Examine what regulation OSHA imposes that can have an effect of the wind industry and understand how to stay in line with it.
• Learn in what ways OSHA can apply to you in the every day maintenance of a wind farm, and look for ways to avoid the likelihood of any fine.
• Discover what you and your team need to be aware of in terms of training.
• The future of safety requirements – will OSHA ever directly target the wind industry?

Grayling Vander Velde, EHS Professional, EHS Field Support

Duke Energy Generation Services (DEGS)

Maximizing Your Turbine Investment: OEM Maintenance

• Look at the approach to working out focused solutions for your wind fleet and understand how this could be advantageous for your needs.
• Discover how the risk of your wind fleet can be matched with solutions for ongoing maintenance.
• Reduce the cost of your O&M by getting inside information on how to be stable in both operations and in your finances.
• Examine the type of improvements that can be made to your wind fleet now and into the future.

Steven M. Richards, Director, Service Sales

Vestas Americas

The benefits of outsourcing working to 3rd party service providers

• Hear from one of the US’s most established service providers what benefits you can expect from 3rd party Operation and Maintenance.
• Understand the advantages of using a 3rd party service provider and see how this can enhance the maintenance management of your wind farm
• Do you have 100% confidence in your service provider? Look at the assessments there are for appraising the appropriateness of an O&M workforce so you can be sure the right team is selected to maintain your wind farm’s individual needs

Dave Luck, Director, O&M Business Development

enXco Service Corporation

Evaluating the suitability of 3rd party service providers

• Weigh up your options – Look at the strategies which can help you assess what method of O&M is right for your wind farm that will save you both time and money.
• Understand what you should be looking for in a 3rd party service provider to ensure the best maintenance of your wind turbines
• Hear how to evaluate the cost effectiveness of a particular service provider according to location & size of your wind farm and the capabilities of a particular workforce in both the long and short term.
• Be confident with your choice of O&M by examining what tools can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an O&M team while working with your wind farm.

Cathy Syme, Senior Project Manager

Garrad Hassan

Strategies for New Unit and Installed base Operations and Maintenance

• Pinpoint the best maintenance strategy for your wind farm with a rundown of the various O&M models that are available.
• Get help in assessing what the most appropriate approach is both your company by comparing short term and long term contracts. 
• Learn how other factors such as fleet size, distribution, technologies can be tailored into a maintenance strategy to deliver you real ROI. 
• The next steps. Take a generic look at the advantages and disadvantages of OEM warranty

Jeff Wiener, Sales and Commercial Director

GE Wind Services

Do you really know your O&M provider? And are your core business objectives protected?

• A look at the history of O&M - understand how stability, experience innovation and cooperation can all benefit your WTG’s production
• How can you make sure your O&M providers have the expertise, capacity, and wherewithal to keep your WTG’s producing when the fuel is available?
• Hear what insurance options there are for the protection of your warranty & production tax credits and how you can cover both your parts and labor
• Reduce the chance of any unforeseen interruption to your business by ensuring you have a clear safety net in place when unexpected maintenance issues arise

Gregg Flobeck, Director, Business Development

SkyClimber Wind Solutions

Chuck Murlin, Insurance Specialist

Brower LLC

The inside track on real wind characteristics and forecasting challenges

• Get the lowdown on characteristics of wind flows below 200m and understand why this knowledge is crucial to your wind turbine’s performance.
• Find out about wind detection and forecasting challenges
• Learn the importance of nowcasting wind patterns and how this can both support and enhance wind facility operations
• Discover what the latest wind detection systems are on the market and which would be best for your wind farm

William Mahoney, Program Director, Research Applications Laboratory

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

CASE STUDY: Best practice in house maintenance

• Hear from one of the US’s top operators how to evaluate the capabilities of a workforce from the time they are hired, and how to later assess the work they are doing while on site to ensure consist excellence
• Understand the steps you should take and the strategies to implement to guarantee the establishment of an efficient in house O&M team
• Find out how to foresee what equipment is need for maintenance purposes and learn how to prepare for the unforeseen.
• Look at how to prioritize maintenance work in order to reduce the risk of wind turbine downtime

Blaine Sundwall, Director of Wind Operations and Maintenance

Iberdrola Renewables USA

Maximize your wind farm production with the proper upkeep of the electrical system

• Get a brief outline of the testing standards for maintaining a wind farm’s high voltage system and why this is of ultimate importance in the mitigation of turbine downtime
• Discover the importance of the down tower aspects of a wind turbine and how the upkeep of these can prevent the failure of your entire wind farm
• Learn about the regulations revolving around arc flash hazards and how to become compliant

Eric Beckman, PE, Field Engineer

National Switchgear

Save valuable time & money with effective spare parts management

• Listen to an industry experts view on the use of effective spare parts management, and learn how you could dramatically slash the cost of your O&M.
• Understand the methods for forecasting what spare parts your wind farm will need and how to source these so that you are never in short supply or without.
• Find out if the stock piling of spare parts is an effective tool for your wind fleet’s needs, and contemplate the idea of a partnership to share assets.
• Being organized is the key to success – hear how to successfully inventory your stock.

Micah Nichols,O&M Manager

Cielo Wind Services Inc 

Improving the Effectiveness of Preventive Maintenance through Predictive Data Studies

• Hear how operating plants can continuously improve reliability by reporting strategic data which can be analyzed to provide critical O&M guidance
• By collecting certain types of data down to the sub-component level, it is possible to understand root-cause failures and thus improve failure prediction
• Improve the effectiveness of preventive maintenance schedules and accuracy of spares forecasting while exposing opportunities for technical improvements

Bridget McKenney, Wind Reliability & Analysis Database Lead, Wind & Water Power TechnologiesSandia National Laboratories

Salvatore A. Della Villa, CEO

Strategic Power Systems, Inc.

PANEL DISCUSSION: Staff recruitment: Have confidence in your work force

• Hear what skills wind technician should be trained in so that you know what to look for when recruiting your next team.
• Learn the qualifications to look for in an employee to make the recruitment phase much more thorough.
• Understand what evaluations there are or should be to ensure only the right staff are recruited to look after your wind fleet and deliver successful maintenance work.
• Listen to whether there are transferrable skills available in other industries from which experienced and skilled staff can be discovered and recruited

Blaine Sundwall, Director of Wind Operations and Maintenance

Iberdrola Renewables USA

Steven M. Richards, Director, Service Sales

Vestas Americas

Keith Plantier, Program Manager

Texas Wind Energy Institute TSTC
Tom Sutton, Mechanical Specialist, Wind Turbine Technician Academy

Kalamazoo Valley Community College

Optimizing field operations for turbine management and worker safety

• Learn how to improve the quality of field data with mobile solutions at the point of interaction with field assets
• Hear about mobile solutions that are optimizing field work processes to drive increased turbine uptime
• Discover how properly-designed and implemented mobile solutions can promote enhanced levels of field work visibility, improving safety and regulatory compliance

Mike Loos, Chief Technology Officer

@hand Corporation

Transparency: Save time and money by understanding the importance of OEM and owner relations

• Hear from one of the leading OEMs in the US and understand the importance of maintaining a good relationship with your customer, and the benefits of doing so.
• Look at what data can be gathered from a wind turbine and why some information is considered more valuable than other.
• Discover how to get the information that you need, and how to decipher this to benefit your budget.
• The OEM perspective: what can be done to better relations in the future?

Terry Callahan, Vice President of Operation, Maintenance and Service

Suzlon Wind Energy

NERC Wind Data Performance Collection System – Required or Not?

• Learn what data will soon be needed by Independent System Operators (ISO), local government agencies, manufacturers, and general public and understand why your business should comply
• Examine the database for accurate and uniform data collection and get to grips with its importance.
• What is the purpose of this? Get the inside track on the uses of this data such as benchmarking wind plants, components, etc.

Michael Curley, Manager, GADS Services

North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)

CASE STUDY: Mitigate gearbox and main bearing failure by understanding your turbine

• Get a rundown of successful techniques for diagnosing a failure and the innovative methods for righting a wrong.
• Listen to insightful information on both gearbox and main shaft loading and understand how this can affect the lifespan of your wind turbine.
• See what OCES has accomplished in terms of retrofitting the gearbox and main bearing to enhance the productivity of a wind turbine.
• Look at the condition monitoring methods that OCES has implemented and find out if it is an effective tool for improving the health management of wind turbines.

Hal Romanowitz, Chief Operating Officer

Oak Creek Energy Systems

An Integrated Approach to Gearbox Reliability

• Get inside information from the gearbox reliability collaborative (GRC) and find out the latest in R&D straight from the mouth of the reputable research institution’s leading experts
• Be a step ahead of the industry and listen to the GRC’s pioneering efforts in analysis, design and testing and understand how this could be of benefit to your maintenance programme.
• Hear where the US wind industry is in terms of condition monitoring and testing and how it has been tailored to help minimize possible wind turbine downtime.
• Discover the tools that you need to develop in order to collect wind turbine failure data in an organizable and searchable manner so that you can preempt faults. 

Francisco Oyague, Research Engineer

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

Keep your turbines’ performance at an optimum level by switching from reactive to predictive maintenance

• Hear how reactive only maintenance is currently hampering the wind industry and discover the strategies you need to convert to preventative maintenance which will save you both significant time and money
• Discover the real benefits of measuring maintenance metrics and how you can use this for continuous improvement
• A breakdown of costs - understand how much you can really save in the conversion to preventative maintenance

Jay Mashburn, Senior Managing Consultant

IBM Global Services

Turning data into information for predictive maintenance

• Hear why condition-based maintenance is essential to your survival in the wind industry
• Learn how a new maintenance philosophy, “Threat-Based Maintenance,” can find and eliminate small equipment problems before they become big ones - in real time
• Discover the real benefits of exploring and exploiting your data and examine actual case studies of how major wind farms are doing it
• Understand how the implementation of ‘Thread-Based Maintenance’ can lead to improved availability and efficiency and, just as importantly, lower your maintenance costs

David Bell, Vice President, Application Engineering

SmartSignal

Effects of drive train component selection on wind farm O&M costs

• Hear from the US’s leading drive train supplier how to realistically define the 20 year life span of a wind turbine gearbox.
• Understand the latest work being carried out in terms of designing for reliability – the ‘six sigma approach’ – and the benefits of this methodology.
• Get a breakdown of the arrangements of a gearbox and how it can have an effect on long and short term reliability of your wind turbine.
• Learn about advancements in drive train research and design and how this could both reduce downtime and maximize the power output of your wind turbine.

Robert Ciszak, Advanced Engineering Leader

GE Drivetrain Technologies

Get to grips with the design, use and reliability of reverse engineered components

Speaker: TBC

Optimize your O&M with the latest in blade design and new technology

• Get the latest insight in the successes of wind turbine blade maintenance and how to avoid the likelihood of any failures
• Understand the advances that have been made in the design of wind turbine blades which help minimize the amount of potential downtime
• Hear how a leading manufacturer sees the future of turbine blades, and how your company could vastly benefit from these upgrades

Robert Burger, Vice President Service Americas

LM Glasfiber

CASE STUDY: The challenges of analyzing the cost effectiveness of Condition Based Monitoring

• Have a look at an experiment conducted by AES to evaluate vibration systems and hear the results of this.
• Financial forecasting – Understand what expenses to expect when investing in condition monitoring and how to assess the projected return
• The evaluation of CBM – Learn what you can anticipate from your investment and understand if it can be considered an effective tool for the overall health management of your wind turbines

Jeff Gibbons, Technical Director

AES Wind Generation

Condition monitoring plus – filling the gaps

• Hear, hot from the research department, what sensors are or will be available that provide early warnings of impending faults within a wind turbine.
• Understand how to successfully use algorithms that explore the turbine's complex dynamic response to pinpoint faults
• Discover the latest in condition monitoring-based control methods that are aimed at maximizing wind turbine reliability.
• Direct insight into the future of condition monitoring to get a better understanding of where will we be in 15 years.

Douglas Adams, PhD, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Director, Center for Systems Integrity Purdue University

Using advanced Computer Modeling for O&M strategy, reliability and cost predictions

• Hear from one of Europe’s wind veterans how to understand a wind farm availability and how to delivering a successful business plan which will stay in control of risks.
• Understand the drivers behind plant performance and costs to gain a better understanding of how to maximise productivity of a wind turbine.
• Look at state-of-the-art probabilistic computer modelling which can tackle O&M related challenges and provide considerable leverage on profitability and performance.
• Discover how to get the most innovative software offerings that exist which are accessible to any decision-maker or manager involved in project design, development or operations

Jean Lemaire, Project Director

Akuo Energy USA

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