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Jul 24, 2024
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A life and career touched by clean energy
Por Invenergy
“In smaller communities, folks are wary of corporate folks coming in and promising X, Y and Z and then not delivering on those expectations,” Paul Gillham, Invenergy’s vice president of renewable operations and maintenance (O&M) – U.S., says. “That’s the experience my family is kind of familiar with.”
Growing up in a small town, Gillham had a firsthand look at how companies looking to do business in communities like his would overpromise and underdeliver to residents, and he learned an early lesson in how not to conduct business.
Gillham’s first exposure to clean energy was in 2001 when he came home from college in search of a summer job and joined a renewable energy company as a wind technician. Shortly after Gillham entered the industry, his grandfather also contracted with an energy company as a landowner to build a wind farm on his property. However, after leasing the land, the company didn’t complete the project and returned the land to Gillham’s family.
Although he didn’t know it yet, Gillham would have an opportunity to help finish the project his family had started with the previous company while working for Invenergy. After gaining experience as a wind technician at the company that first hired him, Gillham joined Invenergy as an O&M manager in 2005, where he helped shepherd Invenergy’s Spring Canyon Energy Center to commercial operations in early 2006. In a full-circle moment for Gillham, Spring Canyon now delivers clean energy to homes, businesses and communities on the same land his family had first leased five years earlier.
Paul Gillham helped get Invenergy's Spring Canyon Energy Center and its expansion (Wind, 122 MW, pictured above) to commercial operations in 2006 as an O&M manager at the site. The wind farm operates on land owned by Gillham's family.
Since that time, Gillham has worked his way up to lead Invenergy’s O&M teams, where he’s dedicated to cultivating O&M teams that develop meaningful relationships in the communities where they work, live and operate.
What is operations and maintenance?
Wind and solar energy centers deliver hundreds of gigawatts of clean, reliable and affordable energy to homes, communities and businesses in the United States annually. The dependable operation of these and other clean energy facilities relies on a team of O&M professionals that are trained to keep these energy centers running smoothly, whether it’s day one or years later.
Operations and maintenance primarily focuses on the preventative and corrective maintenance tasks that keep clean energy sites operating smoothly. O&M includes safety and regulatory compliance, operational monitoring, power plant management, personnel training, and planning and budgeting. At Invenergy Services, O&M collaborates with other functions, including environmental health and safety, asset management, and operations engineering to optimize equipment reliability and longevity.
Although O&M teams across the clean energy industry may share similar areas of expertise, Invenergy Services’ O&M teams have something that sets them apart: our owner’s mindset. Operating with an owner’s mindset means Invenergy Services teams maintain every site as if it were our own, regardless of whether we own it. Gillham knows how Invenergy Services’ owner’s mindset can make a difference for the performance of an energy center and, more importantly, the communities where they’re located. This also means prioritizing hiring locally so the individuals operating our energy centers live in the communities they’re serving.
“We don't want to have a strained relationship with the folks that we're going to run into whether we're repairing a turbine on a landowner’s property or talking with community members in town,” Gillham says. “We want to be able to run into those folks and have a pleasant conversation.”
The four pillars of O&M at Invenergy Services
Invenergy Services’ O&M philosophy comprises four pillars: safety, quality, focus on production, and cost control. Safety is the most important of these principles because it enables Gillham and his team to execute on the other three pillars, he says.
“Our people are our most valuable resource and are the key to our success,” Gillham says. “If we don’t get safety right, nothing else matters.”
Invenergy Services’ O&M teams begin each day with a safety meeting that reminds team members of safety practices, discusses any lessons learned, and emphasizes that no work is worth doing if it can’t be done safely.
In addition to prioritizing safety, Invenergy Services’ other O&M pillars deliver benefits to customers through innovation, flexibility and cost savings.
As part of Invenergy Services’ focus on quality, O&M teams prioritize preventative maintenance to help extend the longevity of a site’s equipment and the overall lifespan of a project. By focusing on preventative maintenance, Invenergy Services’ O&M offering also provides greater flexibility and cost savings for customers compared to a traditional full-service agreement with original equipment manufacturers. Sites working under full-service agreements tend to focus on corrective maintenance, only repairing components once something has broken, which can lead to gaps in availability, reduction of a site’s output, and costly repairs.
Thirdly, to help identify and execute preventative maintenance needs and to maintain our focus on production, Invenergy Services uses a robust suite of data analytics to help sites maintain high availability and output.
“To say data analytics plays a big role in our operational effectiveness is an understatement,” Gillham says. “Being able to understand equipment trends and identify potential early deterioration through data allows us to be proactive in our decision-making, and it often reduces eventual repair costs as well as equipment downtime.”
The combination of safety, quality control, and a focus on production results in cost savings for customers. Proactive, efficient and safe O&M practices ultimately lead to the delivery of clean, reliable and affordable energy to the homes and communities that need it most.
“Integrity is at the core of what Invenergy does,” Gillham says. “We do what we say we’re going to do, and we understand that we’re going to be a part of the communities where we’re developing projects. We want to make people feel like valuable members of our projects, for them to know that they’re important to us.”
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