Big Rivers Coleman Station wins operational excellence award | Business

Coleman Station, located in Hawesville,  ranked first and won the 2012 Operational Excellence Award in the small coal plant category by Navigant Consulting, based on its performance in cost, operations, and safety.

“We congratulate Coleman employees on receiving this award, which symbolizes successful pursuit of three of our seven corporate values: safety, excellence and teamwork,” said Mark Bailey, president and CEO. “Big Rivers is very proud of the Coleman staff for this significant achievement, but also recognizes the contribution of the entire production group, given the collective approach they use in making investment and maintenance decisions.”

Navigant Consulting, the industry’s premier benchmarking service for fossil-fired generation plants, measures and evaluates the operational performance and cost of generating units and compares them to their peers. Roughly 78 percent of the North American utility coal fleet—including utilities such as Duke Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority, American Electric Power and Southern Company—are clients with Navigant Consulting.

“Big Rivers is excited for Coleman Station to be ranked first nationally for operational excellence of similar-sized power plants among some of the largest utilities in the United States,” commented Bob Berry, vice president of power production. “This is just an incredible accomplishment for our Coleman Power Plant and we are extremely proud of the plant management and staff.”

To be eligible for this award, plants are required to enter five years of continuous data. Although Big Rivers tracks this data historically, 2012 is the first year that any Big Rivers generating station had five years of data entered for benchmarking. Plants were evaluated over the five-year period of 2007-2011 in the following areas:

• Efficient cost management of non-fuel operations and maintenance

• High availability measured by equivalent availability factor, which is the percentage of time a generating unit is available for power production

• Predictable reliability measured by equivalent unplanned outage rate (EUOR), which is the percentage of time a generating unit is unexpectedly off-line

• Improving reliability as a trend in EUOR

• Safety performance based on Occupational Safety and Health Administration non-hearing recordable incidents per 200,000 hours worked

The small plant category includes generating stations with an average unit size of 200 MW or less. Coleman Station produces 443 MW across three generating units, which equates to an average unit size of about 148 MW.

“This award is a credit to every Coleman Station employee,” praised Plant Manager Wayne O’Bryan. “Without their effort and dedication to excellence, this level of success would not be possible.”