Show Notes
Power plant construction and retrofit projects come in all shapes and sizes, but they all generally have at least one thing in common: complexity. There are usually a lot of moving pieces that must be managed. This can include sourcing the right materials and components, getting equipment delivered to the site at the right time, finding qualified contractors, and overseeing handoffs between working groups. Getting a job done on time and on budget is not as easy as some people might think. “It absolutely can be difficult and a lot of things to consider,” Kevin Slepicka, vice president of Sales for Heat Recovery Boilers at Rentech Boiler Systems, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “You’ve got to make sure that communication is ongoing between your suppliers and the end user.” Rentech is a leading manufacturer of boiler systems including package boilers, waste heat boilers, and heat recovery steam generators (HRSGs). Rentech’s fabrication facilities are in Abilene, Texas. “We have three shops,” Slepicka explained. “There’s 197,000 square feet of manufacturing space under roof. We’ve got over 100 tons of lift capability with cranes, and we can bring in other cranes for our heavier lifts. Our properties are located on 72 acres, so we have a lot of room for staging equipment, storing equipment, if customers aren’t ready to take delivery at the time the units are done.” Moving large boilers from Texas to sites around the country and other parts of the world can be difficult, which is another reason why good communication is imperative. “Shipping is a major consideration on how the unit is constructed, how much is going to be built in the facility, and how large we can ship. So, it really goes hand in hand with the design of the boiler,” Slepicka said. “It really is important that we work with our logistics people and work with our partner companies that do our transportation for us.” Communication with customers on potential future needs is also important. Slepicka said knowing that a retrofit may be required down the road to account for a new environmental regulation, for example, could allow a boiler system to be designed with space to accommodate changes. This could save a lot of money and headaches in the long run. “That’s where you’ve got to be able to work with the customer—make sure you understand the space available and make sure that the unit’s going to work properly,” he said. Slepicka said Rentech had a customer recently that faced new formaldehyde restrictions and needed its HRSG system modified. “Luckily, we had the space in the unit where that catalyst could be installed in the right location to address the concern they had, so it was a relatively easy retrofit for them to make.” If the prospect had not been considered up front, the cost and complexity could have been much greater.
More from The POWER Podcast
In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Sandeep Kumar Gupta, sales director with Siemens Energy Gas Services, and Naira Elsayed, a senior project manager with Elsewedy Electric Power Systems Projects (PSP), discuss the Rabigh Reinforcement Combined Cycle Power Plant, a finalist for a 2026 POWER Top Plant Award.
Utilities and independent power producers have spent years adding sensors to their generating fleets and creating dashboards to view what they relay. But visibility into how a plant is operating isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it—and that gap is where Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Management System is increasingly shedding light, explained two of the company’s experts as guests on The POWER Podcast. “Monitoring is just telling you what’s happening,” said Sarah Dietrich-Smith, Siemens Energy’s commercialization manager for Omnivise Energy Market and Fleet Management Solutions, “and Energy Management is telling you what should happen next, and it helps you to execute that decision,” she explained. The distinction, she said, is the real difference between tracking a plant’s condition and actually optimizing it—moving “from just this visibility to true optimization that you can actually take action on, and optimization that’s based and tied to measurable business outcomes.” From Single Assets to Whole Fleets Katie Hanley, head of Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Market and Fleet Management Solutions team, framed Energy Management as fundamentally a question of business outcomes. Given a plant’s generation commitments, gas hedging position, and access to additional electricity markets, “What are the optimized economics for running your plant or your fleet?” she asked. “Historically, assets were managed individually. They really only cared about the question, ‘How can we get the single asset to perform better?’ ” Dietrich-Smith said. “We want to move into a fleet optimization mindset.” One plant might be constrained while another has more flexibility—sometimes for regional reasons, such as differing prices or curtailment risk in different markets. “This fleet-level approach is what’s going to help operators allocate flexibility, manage this risk, and ultimately optimize the commercial performance across the full portfolio,” she said, “instead of just making that isolated asset or site-level decision.” Dietrich-Smith also pushed back on a common assumption about where the value comes from. “I think the most common misconception is that the only value we’re bringing is efficiency improvement,” she said. Customers also see fewer penalties, more effective participation in electricity markets, and faster response to changing conditions—benefits she summed up simply: “Time is money.” Renewables Complicate the Math A growing share of that fleet-level complexity traces back to renewables, Hanley said, whether a customer operates a hybrid portfolio directly or simply competes in a market where renewable penetration is rising. She described thinking in terms of dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generation: as more renewables come online, dispatchable options become scarcer, making it harder to maintain grid stability—and more important to predict when instability might occur. That prediction problem pulls in weather and market data alike, from cloud cover and wind speeds at different altitudes to real-time electricity prices. For a hybrid site with battery storage, the same data informs decisions about when to charge from onsite generation versus the grid, and when to discharge—sometimes purely to arbitrage low prices rather than to support the site’s own generation. “These batteries are creating dispatchable flexibility when normally we would only be able to do that with some of our large gas assets,” Hanley said, adding that customers are increasingly weighing a battery discharge against ramping up a plant or duct burning, based on which is the better economic call in the moment. Hanley closed the conversation on a practical note for listeners still weighing where to start. “Everything is only getting more complex, so give us a call,” she said.
Public power utilities have long promised lower bills, reliable service, and decisions made close to home—and the data still backs that up. But holding that ground is getting harder. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Scott Corwin, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), talks about the forces now testing the community-owned utility model. Corwin explains why resource adequacy, reliability, and affordability have converged into the defining challenge for APPA's roughly 2,000 member systems—a concern that once affected only certain regions but now stretches across nearly the entire membership. He breaks down the tools public power uses to keep rates down, including tax-exempt financing and elective pay credits, and why local control itself acts as a check on spending. The conversation also digs into the issues reshaping the sector: how smaller utilities are evaluating massive data center interconnection requests while protecting ratepayers; why Corwin describes public power's generation strategy as "any of the above" rather than "all of the above"; and the structural headwinds—permitting delays, an aging workforce, supply chain strain, and cybersecurity—that determine what utilities can build and how fast. Corwin closes with what he most wants policymakers to understand about community-owned utilities, and the value of 2,000 diverse communities speaking with one voice on affordability and reliability. Listen to the full conversation to hear how public power is navigating one of the most dynamic periods the industry has faced in years.
A perfect storm is brewing across the U.S. power generation fleet. Between 600 and 700 GE 7FA gas turbines installed during the bubble of 2000–2004—plus roughly 900 7EA units worldwide—are simultaneously approaching the OEM's 144,000-hour, 5,000-start end-of-life threshold. Superalloy forgings carry multi-year lead times. Only a handful of shops worldwide can service these machines. And the data center boom is pushing utilization higher than anyone planned for.
Duke Energy operates 11 nuclear units across six sites in the Carolinas — a fleet that produces more than half of the region's electricity year in and year out. In 2025, that fleet posted its best capacity factor on record, north of 97%.