Construction of new power plants is needed to support the growing needs of electricity in our day-to-day life, including AI! No matter the industry, construction is always a challenge, and delays represents significant costs. Technology can assist to make the process even more repeatable and de-risk infrastructure construction projects. Before we dive into explanation of proven solutions that already exists, lets remind ourselves of the problems and challenges associated with construction projects like new power plants.
We need more renewable power plants and half of projects are facing delays!
Coal is still the largest source of combustible for the electric grid globally with 35%! As the electricity demand keep increasing with Electrification of vehicle, standard living improvements and more recently AI demand, a lot of new Power plants needs to be built, especially using sustainable and clean source of energy. As most renewable power plants are intermittent, they need to be balanced with dispatchable sources like hydro, nuclear, natural gas plants or more recently batteries. Building power plants isn’t an easy task as it needs a lot of work pre-construction with the permitting, design and planning and the construction itself to ensure it is delivered as per the design.
As indicated in a recent Reuters article, more than half of renewable constructions projects are facing delays of more than 12 months. These are caused by a mix of delays pre-construction and during the construction. This article focuses on the construction part of the problem. No matter if you execute the construction directly with your employees or subcontractors or outsource to an Engineering, Procurement, and Construction contractor (EPC), digitalization can become your secret weapon to repeat your successes and increase productivity!
Building new power plants on time, on budget and as per design is challenging!
Cost of delays can kill the expected ROI on the important investment to be made. Developers of solar and wind power plants hire sub-contractors to execute many specialized task and need ways to ensure that the construction is not only following the timeline and budget, but also match the quality expected. They need to identify and track discrepancies between the as-built product and the as-planned design and make corrections, and this re-work takes time and cost money. Maintaining a digital construction punch list that is central can do significant impact to your efficiency.
Larger the site, more monitoring. And typically, developers have multiple projects in parallel which makes this problem exponential.
This is quite a challenge that digitalization and AI can help in multiple ways to keep things standard and repeat the process and avoid delays.
Communication and structured coordination are essential
A lot of time and efforts can be lost if the coordination between all workers is not efficient and not aligned with most up to date information. Like any infrastructure construction, a lot of unknown happens during a project and good coordination between all workers added to access to the more recent information avoid re-work. Access to a Construction Project management software allow to workers to always have access to the newest design. In case of unclarity, worker needs to ask question instead of assuming and most potentially executing a task incorrectly. It is easy to misallocate resource and confuse teams without strong communication and access to the right information.
Solar and Wind farms are often located in remote areas, but now with Low Orbit Satellite provide high speed internet everywhere, there is no reason to execute a construction without being connected 24/7 to the internet for proper communication and collaboration.
Construction Project Management Solution Payback is very short
A picture worth a thousand words. With a Construction Project management tool, it is possible to quickly take a picture of a question, a defect and send it to the project expert that can respond quickly or plan a corrective action to avoid domino effect on project timeline. A mistake that is identified late cost many times more then if avoided or captured early.
A lot of time and energy is spent on optimizing the design of the plant, so it is important that during the construction things move smoothly to follow the design and when required decisions to are made quickly. Very frequent comparison of the in-progress tasks with the project plan are essential to evaluate the progress and confirm if the plant is built and will be delivered as per the design and schedule.
Typically, those tools are representing in a % of the cost of the construction and have unlimited use. Unlimited number of users, unlimited usage for a given site. All blueprints’ plans can be updated and used as the main document storage for the project so all actors sees the same information and can collaborate on it without confusion or miscommunication. This represents faster execution and lest re-work which means cheaper and faster.
Images to monitor precisely and objectively the progress
Monitoring frequently and objectively the progress of the construction is a challenge, especially when the site is remote. Standardizing the process across multiple sites in different regions is also a challenge.
With the progress and cost reduction of drones, the cost of monitoring the site with drones went significantly down, and here is another good example of investing in digitalizing the progress monitoring can save the team time as a part of the progress report can be automated, and most of all reduce costs as a mistake can.
Having access to construction progress photos and videos can help a lot, but when you add an AI solution to process those images, things get quite interesting. Images can be compared to the blueprint and indicate if some mistakes need to be fixed quickly or provide an objective % or progress based on visual, confirm if some equipment/materials were delivered or sub-contractor work completed so it trigger a milestone to release a payment, …
This can also be used to identify any Health and Safety risk at the site and ask for adjustments before an accident happens.
Pros and cons…
The negative “Big Brother” perception that using drones might bring can be easily mitigated on the moment when those drones are flown, when there are less people at the site. Also, we might see an offer to be developed with satellite information that is becoming stronger and cheaper.
This challenge is more than offset by the numerous benefits that allow to share information more effectively with all stakeholders involved in the construction. Which allow a construction that avoid re-work costs and more accurate, objective and standard way to evaluate the progress of a construction site.
Add more digital to your construction to improve your ROI
Using drones to automate the reporting of your construction monitoring or using specialized construction management solution to collaborate in real time in remote area might seem like science fiction to some of you but it is not. A growing number of providers offer those technologies and services which are already used with success by an increasing number of businesses.
To control the cost of such, need to evaluate few offers, negotiate well and control the implementation plan starting small with a POC at only one site.
There is no magic. Like the introduction of new modern tool to your progress, you need to start small. Find the right technology, the right implementor to replicate the success of other organizations. Don’t fall behind!
Before you jump into your project to implement such tool, make sure you have the right plan and framework. Numerous providers exist, please execute proper due diligence or work with expert from the industry to help with tool selection.
Build faster and better! With data…As the solution is not only in a tool, but in the change management that involves people, process and technology!
