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The POWERGEN Fleet Operations Forum is a closed session designed for the people running gas, combined cycle, cogen and coal units.
There is no stage, no vendors and no polished talking points. Thermal plant and fleet leaders will share firsthand how they’re running their units and the operational challenges they’re working through, from the fleet level to the plant floor, followed by informal open discussion with everyone in the room.
*Complimentary for qualified owner-operators. Seating is limited
The Format
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State-of-the-fleet briefings (~10 min each): Each speaker gives a short, candid look at how their units are performing: what’s working, what isn’t and what they’d do differently.
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Open discussion: The floor opens to everyone in the room. Bring your questions, compare notes and put your own challenges on the table.
*The session operates under Chatham House Rule. Participants may use what they hear but may not attribute it to any person or organization. Recording is strictly prohibited. Attendance is capped to preserve the conditions that make this format work.
Speakers
Jason Graham
Power Plant Manager, Avista Utilities
Brad Richards
Vice President, Thermal Generation, PacifiCorp
Topics Covered
- Lifecycle management of aging assets: keeping equipment that was slated for retirement running reliably now that the system needs it
- Capital allocation under regulatory and policy uncertainty: how do you justify investing in an asset with a nominal retirement date
- OEM relationships and supply chain: navigating long lead times, constrained service capacity, and shifting vendor priorities
- Cycling and ramping stress: running baseload units like peakers, with more starts, lower minimum loads and the tube failures and fatigue damage that follow
- Outage planning and execution: scoping, staffing and parts availability when units can’t afford to be offline long
- Workforce and knowledge transfer: capturing tribal knowledge as experienced plant personnel retire
- Load growth and unit availability: what being asked to run harder and retire later means for maintenance budgets and reliability
- Winter readiness: cold-weather preparation, fuel supply and lessons from recent peaks
Who You'll Be in the Room With
This room is for the people who own the outcome when a unit trips, an outage runs long or a retirement gets pushed back. That means thermal plant and fleet leadership at utilities, IPPs, electric cooperatives and merchant generators, including:
- Chief generation officer or chief operating officer with generation oversight
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VP of generation or VP of operations
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Director of generation or director of fleet operations
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Director of power operations or director of power supply
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Director of asset management
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Director of maintenance and reliability
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Outage manager or director of plant engineering
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Manager of generation planning
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Regional generation manager
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Plant manager, station manager or plant general manager
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O&M manager or operations manager
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Maintenance supervisor
Vendors, consultants and OEMs are not part of this session.
Why now
Aging thermal units are staying online longer than planned, and they’re being asked to cycle harder than they were designed for. Load growth is pushing retirement dates back and raising the stakes on availability. Lead times for major parts and OEM field service have stretched, while outage windows keep getting shorter. Obsolete controls and hard-to-find spares are turning routine repairs into engineering projects.
Skilled contract labor is scarce during peak outage seasons, and the people who know each unit’s quirks are retiring, taking that knowledge with them. Meanwhile, policy uncertainty makes it harder to justify capital for units with a retirement date on the books, leaving plants to decide what to fix, what to defer and what to run to failure.
These are the pressures generation executives, fleet directors and plant managers are managing every day, with few places to talk about them candidly with peers.