In 2016, Siraj Taj, established ST Power Services with a singular mission—to provide tailored solutions and expert guidance to thermal power plants navigating an increasingly complex energy landscape. With over 30 years of experience in the power industry, Taj, Founder and Principal of ST Power Services transformed it into a trusted partner renowned for its innovative, collaborative, and pragmatic approach to solving industry challenges. Established as a consulting and contract negotiation firm, the company has evolved into a customized Operations and Maintenance (O&M) strategy provider. “We focus on maximizing total asset performance and tackling obsolescence challenges,” says Taj. This strategic shift began when changes in the energy landscape led to gas turbines cycling more frequently, revealing critical asset performance issues. The increased turbine cyclic operation placed greater stress on the components, resulting in higher failure rates, elevated maintenance costs, and revenue losses. Simultaneously, the reduced capacity factors of these turbines had resulted in longer maintenance intervals, which decreased the frequency with which original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) produce replacement parts. Enhancing Asset Performance through a Collaborative Approach Extended planned maintenance cycle due to reduced capacity factors compelled plant owners and operators to reassess their plant O&M strategies to optimize asset performance, ensure profitability, and mitigate risk of failure. Meanwhile, OEM faced idle manufacturing facilities resulting in increased lead time to manufacture turbine parts, especially for ageing turbines. Heavy cyclic operation and extended planned maintenance cycles increase the probability of component failure during operation resulting in forced outage. OEM’s increasingly longer lead time to manufacture and supply parts during forced outages results in plant unavailability, loss of revenue, higher repair costs, and reduced profits. It became imperative for plant owners to seek innovative and pragmatic solutions that are technically and commercially viable to reduce the plant downtime during forced outages. ST Power Services have been working with thermal plants to evaluate their existing O&M strategy that’s primarily focused on working with OEMs despite the higher maintenance costs and long lead time. The revised O&M strategy is focused on innovation, collaboration, and pragmatism. A key part of this strategy involves working with after market parts and service providers and to collaborate with the global User community to share their critical spare parts with each other. In other words, the global User community helps each other during forced outages, resulting in reduced downtime and relatively low costs. For instance, ST Power Services’s key customer had a combustor failure during operation resulting in significant damage to their gas turbine and various other components. Due to the OEM's excessively long lead time for the necessary parts to repair the gas turbine, ST Power Services helped the plant source used parts from a plant in Argentina that operates the same gas turbine technology. The used GT parts were assessed and repaired on-site, the failed gas turbine was rebuilt, and it was returned to service in significantly less time and cost. ST Power Services works closely with subject matter experts to continuously improve innovative and pragmatic solutions to extend the service life of turbine parts, implement pragmatic O&M strategy to extend maintenance cycle, and mitigate risk of failure. That has resulted in increased plant availability, higher profitability, and reduced costs.