British Energy

Enhancing Nuclear Outage Planning at Hinkley Point

British Energy is the largest producer of electricity in the UK, serving millions of consumers. Operational safety and excellence is the number one priority in delivering these services.

Challenge

To ensure the safe and effective operation of nuclear generators, British Energy undertakes a strict maintenance regime which requires power generation to be discontinued for a sustained period. This outage process is a long and complex one, hugely demanding in both time and resources.

As each day of outage overrun can represent up to £1m of lost revenue it is essential that every outage is meticulously planned, monitored and implemented to keep disruption to an absolute minimum.

The planning process for outages can start anything up to 24 months in advance and the details for future outages are known for a 15 year timescale

Given the number of critical challenges facing this process it is imperative that British Energy has a strong foundation on which to carry out the outage.

Solution

LSC Group were contracted to provide critical engineering planning support services to British Energy.

LSC Group consultants are established as part of a fully integrated outage team, which is responsible for the management and coordination of equipment and plans critical to the outage programme.

Benefits

Potentially running savings into millions of pounds, LSC Group consultants have already added value beyond the original scope of the project.

During the 2008 outage process a number of benefits were achieved, specifically:

• Improving the critical path schedule
• Improving business analysis reporting
• Innovative solutions for tracking key dates and managing resource levels throughout the outage process
• Improving management visibility of performance during the outage process

LSC Group consultants will continue to be heavily involved in pre-outage planning for the 2009 statutory outage programme.