Coal Plant Preventive Maintenance

As a result of findings in a recent evaluation 2012-14845, Review of TVA's Nuclear Power Group Preventive Maintenance, we conducted a review of coal plant preventive maintenance (PM). The objective of our review was to determine if PM was performed in accordance with established schedules and if not, what effect the deviations were having.We found compliance with PM schedules varies by plant, and the PM compliance metric captured may not fully represent all PM activities not completed. The monthly PM compliance percentage varied from 10.5 to 100 percent. The most common reasons cited for not completing PM or adjusting the PM schedule was resource driven and/or due to emergent/sponsored work. We also found if a work order did not have the correct reconciliation code, a canceled PM task would be counted as completed, which skewed the data. Reconciliation codes are essential for accurate reporting, but they are not a required field in Maximo.We found that both uncompleted and unestablished PM contributed to equipment failures. In a review of 65 Problem Evaluation Reports (PERs), we identified six PERs linking failures to PM issues. Four of those PERs related to equipment for which no PM schedule or requirement had been established, and two PERs related to uncompleted PM tasks. We also found plants were making progress implementing the new Maintenance Basis Optimization (MBO) but had seen some delays in achieving target dates. Support of outages had impacted some sites' abilities to complete its MBO phases. Additionally, we found the absence of PM requirements could make it harder to manage equipment reliability risk.We recommended the Senior Vice President, Power Operations, (1) increase PM completion/reduce deviations from PM schedules and reinforce the importance of PM activities, (2) develop a way to more accurately capture and report PM compliance and other appropriate PM tracking metrics, (3) expedite MBO efforts, and (4) consider the potential impact of having PM governed only by guidelines and not requirements. TVA management generally agreed with the recommendations in the report.