Rehabilitation – Classroom Presentations
CLEAN CURRENTS 2026
Time: 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Day: 9/24/2026
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Details about each presentation and the speakers are below:
In this session:
Outage Planning in the 21st Century
Hydro Modernization – Complete Generator Replacement
Wide Operating Francis Turbine Upgrade
Outage Planning in the 21st Century (Avista Utilities)
Presented by Clint Kalich, Avista Utilities
Hydro operators are navigating a rapidly evolving landscape: aging infrastructure, tighter river constraints, growing renewable integration, and rising expectations for reliability and cost control. Outage planning sits at the center of these pressures, yet most utilities still rely on spreadsheets, siloed communication, and manual coordination to schedule generation and transmission outages. Avista takes a different approach.
This session will showcase how Avista is modernizing hydro (and thermal) outage planning by combining traditional maintenance planning tools with a powerful, internally developed production cost modeling platform extensible to other utility systems. This commercial-grade software model is the analytical engine behind a new, integrated planning ecosystem that improves reliability, strengthens communication, and significantly reduces outage-related costs.
Rather than treating outages as isolated maintenance events, Avista's model evaluates each outage as a system-wide economic and reliability decision that considers and optimizes real-world constraints such as budgets, crew availability, resource constraints, and the need to support peak-period loads. It simulates generation availability, river system constraints, market exposure, transmission impacts, and customer risk, all within a framework tailored to the operational realities of hydro. Because the tool is developed in house, it benefits from decades of Avista experience across a diverse resource portfolio anchored by hydro resources. It can rapidly iterate and adapt its analytics to emerging operational challenges.
The result is a cultural and operational shift. Planners, operators, engineers, and asset managers now share a common analytical language and a transparent view of outage impacts compatible with existing spreadsheet and traditional software solutions (e.g., Primavera). Conversations move from reactive scheduling to strategic optimization. Outage timing becomes a question of minimizing cost, maximizing reliability, and aligning system needs, not simply fitting work into a calendar.
Attendees will learn how Avista's approach has enabled:
More transparent and defensible outage schedules
Stronger justification for preventive maintenance and capital upgrades
A measurable reduction in annual outage-related costs
A system-wide shift toward proactive, coordinated planning
This session offers a practical, replicable roadmap for hydro operators seeking to modernize outage planning, unlock the full value of integrated modeling, and demonstrate higher value for their assets within an organization.
Hydro Modernization – Complete Generator Replacement (INGETEAM INDAR MACHINES / Southern Company)
Presented by Simon Bohec, INGETEAM INDAR MACHINES
During a hydro powerplant modernization project, choosing between a generator rehabilitation and a complete generator replacement requires careful consideration. The purpose of this presentation is to provide a comparative insight between complete generator replacement and rehabilitation using recent case studies and analysis on costs, outage duration, as well as operation and maintenance. The presentation will also focus on the split stator core technical solution and its viability depending on generator size and powerplant access limitations.
Wide Operating Francis Turbine Upgrade (American Hydro LLC / Ameren)
Presented by Sean Perkins, American Hydro LLC
Hydropower continues to play a crucial role in maintaining a stable grid, particularly with the growing strain of non-dispatchable sources like wind and solar. While pump-turbines can manage some of this, conventional hydro remains one of the most viable sources of grid stability. This is achieved by operating hydroturbines at off-design operating points that would normally cause high vibrations and pressure pulsations in conventional machines.
American Hydro continues to invest in technology to deliver wide operating performance, and has recently commissioned two 0-100% Francis runners at the Osage plant for Ameren. These are fairly high specific speed runners with a 14-foot diameter that can produce over 33 MW each. This design was developed with CFD and verified with scale model testing, where the scale model showed excellent part-load performance both with and without air admission. Recent commissioning and air admission testing showed excellent scale-up of performance, with no rough zones, zero operating restrictions from 0-100%, and excellent shaft runout at any operating point across the operating range.
In addition to addressing rough operation, American Hydro retrofitted the turbines to admit large quantities of air to increase dissolved oxygen levels in the river downstream. American Hydro did this with both central and peripheral air admission systems, with an uncompromised runner design.
American Hydro and Ameren will jointly present the successes of this project at Clean Currents.
