Though the Power Management requirements of Power Plants have common features to those of a Stand-By Installation, the basic operational concept differs since a Power Plant must:

• Work continuously.
• Provide electricity of acceptable and standard quality.
• Avoid costly blackouts or maintenance shutdowns.
• Be cost effective

All power producing companies retrofit their automation systems once or even twice in the life time of a plant. MAS specialises in power plant retrofits and delivers proven solutions which virtually guarantee the plants increase in reliability, availability and quality of the power produced while simultaneously decrease the operational costs.

Although every Power Management system is custom made and depends on the plants installed base and operation needs, the basic functionality includes:

• Fully automated synchronizations and Isochronous parallel operation of all the prime movers.
• Precision load sharing of active and reactive power between all generators.
• Full unmanned operation with the automatic starting and stopping of generators depending on the current or expected power needs of the system.
• Flexible operation of each unit through different operational scenarios (variable power, fixed-load, fixed power factor, etc) which can be changed while the unit is in operation.
• Automatic frequency and voltage correction.
• Extensive automatic fault management scenarios with active or reactive load shading and auto recovery capabilities.
• System Redundancy.
• Unified and homogenised operation of the whole installation through central sophisticated control systems.

The extent of automation delivered depends on the Power Plants type and prime movers. For plants running with high speed reciprocating engines a fully unmanned system can be implemented which is often monitored from a remote location. For plants running large low-speed reciprocating engines and/or Turbines a fully automated system can be implemented which requires less staff for its monitoring.

Naturally a correct Power Management System of a power plant should also include the upgrade of the controls of the prime movers and the monitoring systems. MAS usually undertakes power plant upgrades on a turn-key basis where the upgrade of the prime movers control systems and the installation of a plant-wide SCADA system are also included.