Gionata VISCONTI

The base case is not a plan. Once an “idea” has successfully moved across the various development steps and reached the maturity required to be called a “project”, a new and more subtle act of self-deception usually follows: the base case quietly becomes the plan. On paper, the base case is a useful and internally consistent construct. It allows financial models to converge on an IRR, committees to approve, and investment memos to look reassuringly serious. The question is not why we use base...

Condition-based maintenance (CBM), and later Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM), are ideas that sound irresistibly rational. Measure the condition, detect degradation, intervene only when needed, increase uptime, extend asset life. Conceptually I like the CBM principle: it is clean, elegant, and in some environments it genuinely works. Where I struggle is with the way it is sold to power plants. CBM was developed by the US Air Force in the ‘50s, and RCM followed in the ‘70s, again for...

Inventory management is one of those topics too many people want to talk about in power generation. It can keep meetings and committees busy for hours and conveniently justify spending, which is precisely why it quietly destroys value when it is done badly. When a power plant is presented to me as “operationally under control,” the presentation usually comes with H&S statistics (that by now everyone has learned how to mystify), availability figures, heat rate, and a good assortment of KPIs on...