just monitor it until it is taken offline permanently ? Because within our industry in Nova Scotia and in some of the North American utilities we have the ultimate aim of reducing our coal fleet ,” he explains .
In working towards that , MacNeil highlights the need to be systematically flexible as the use of assets change . “ Where some units would have been base-loaded in the past , now they ’ re cycling , so you cannot maintain them in the same way . They have new failure mechanisms that need to be considered , and therefore your maintenance strategy and activities need to change .” By taking a holistic approach to asset management , unlike more traditional environments where each plant makes its own decisions , NSP are able to make portfolio decisions . “ We ’ re confident our investment dollars are going where they need to be ,” says MacNeil . “ We ’ re meeting the mission of each unit … It might be a base-load unit , a two-shifting or a flex unit . It might be a unit that needs to retire in a short amount of time . This process of detailed risk understanding enables us to function in those variety of realities for various generating assets , and therefore we ’ re hitting the
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