The Indian power sector is going through a phase of growth, witnessing positive
changes in terms of reforms and opportunities for the players across the value chain
and emerged as the second largest market for Power (after China). All the major
technology players and private owners targeting to grab the opportunity and thus
keeping continuous pressure on the market price levels. Increasing input cost, is
making the margin challenging for the EPC contractors and enhancing the capital
cost further for Owners. The only solution seems to be improving the efficiency of
execution and operation and having a lean structure to offer minimal fixed cost.
Power Plant's efficiency is dependent on quality of its equipment engineering &
style of operations and maintenance. A modern, advanced, C&I system plays a major
role in the profitable operation of a plant by achieving maximum availability, reliability,
flexibility, maintainability and efficiency.
Earlier Power plant owners or Turnkey EPC contractors would procure individual C&I
items separately from respective OEMs. The job of interface engineering and integration
was undertaken by the customer / EPC itself. As time progressed, advancements in
Technology brought in more sophistication in features and communication capabilities
of instruments for better fault analysis and uptime for the plant. With this sophistication,
systems have become more high end and intelligent and thereby the need for integrating
these intelligent systems have become very important. The amount of high-skilled
design and engineering resource required for integration has become much more than
ever before. Similarly, the ordering cycle for such items have gone up due to its
complexititie. So, the bandwidth requirement of the execution and procurement has
gone high for a individual package based ordering scenario.
To face the dual challenges of reduction of fixed cost and need for higher
skill set and bandwidth, more and more customers today are looking for specialist
partners who can take up the job of providing a complete integrated package
that can insure sustained availability of plant at higher performance level, instead
of investing into talent and skill in doing it in-house, which in turn increases
his fixed cost and thereby lowers competitiveness.
Today I-BOP is the emerging trend in the market, where companies have started procuring
complete C&I systems as a single package. This helps users as it minimizes multiple
vendor evaluation, order placement, co-ordination and vendor engineering and thereby
free-up resources for some other activities. It is convenient for end-to-end responsibility
for site Co-Ordination and management. Thus, on a overall basis it offers cost advantage
to the owner.
The key success factor for an IBOP contract would be the choice of the vendor. The
vendor has to be reliable and financially strong. The vendor has to be a specialist
in C&I domain, offer best in engineering practices and high-end project & site management
skills. Also, it is very important to properly define Change Management in the contract,
since IBOP is finalised at a relatively early stage of execution and as engineering
progresses, changes would be inevitable."
Srinivas Ramesh
Sr. Exec. VP
Reliance - Infra
C&I being a critical but relatively low value package and integration intensive,
customers find it easy to partner with a reliable party who can offer a packaged
solution.
The component of C&I systems for a Power Plant is depicted in the figure below:
Depending upon the packaging philosophy customers adopt, some of the C&I packages
get into the scope of the respective boiler / turbine package vendors. Otherwise
they are either in the scope of the owner or the EPC Contractor. The trend of clubbing
all the C&I items which are left in the scope of the Customer / EPC contractor into
one single package gave rise to the concept of IBOP.
Making an IBOP package and ordering it to a C&I specialist party offers the following
advantages:
- Lesser Co-Ordination required with various low value C&I package vendors / OEMs
- Lesser manpower requirement for vendor engineering
- Ease in follow-up due to single window approach
- Convenient site Co-Ordination
- Sharing of responsibilities between customer & I-BOP contractor
- Availability of technical expertise from one C&I specialist contractor, rather than multiple OEMs
- Advantage of project management skills, site execution and risk management capability
Conclusion
IBOP concept is a timely solution to the customers towards:
- Fixed cost reduction by adopting a skeleton execution structure
- Getting seamless integration and interface engineering done by a single specialist party
For the C&I systems providers also, this concept helps to scale up and thereby provide the cost benefit due to economy of scale to the customers and provide a single window interface for smooth project execution.
Thus, in today's market IBOP concept offers a win-win solution for both the customers and the system providers.