The POWER Podcast

As power generation fleets add wind, solar, and battery storage to conventional gas, steam, and hydro assets, operators are being asked to coordinate more technologies than ever while maintaining the reliability society depends on. At the same time, interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is growing. But can AI deliver on its promise without a trusted operational foundation? In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Mark Robens, sales head for North and Western Europe for Controls & Digitalization at Siemens Energy, discusses why trusted control matters more, not less, as digitalization and AI advance. Robens argues that AI is only as good as the information it has access to, and that incomplete or inconsistent operational data will not produce reliable recommendations. Robens explains why large offshore wind farms now qualify as critical infrastructure in their own right, and how that changes what operators expect from their control systems. He describes a recent microgrid project in South America in which gas turbines, wind generation, and battery storage are orchestrated as one coordinated system, and he discusses why cybersecurity must be built into the foundation of a control system rather than added as an afterthought. The conversation also covers the relationship between the Omnivise T3000 control system and the Omnivise ecosystem, which Robens sums up as “control across, value above.” He explains how an ecosystem approach connects operational data, applications, and workflows, and he shares an example from Portuguese energy company EML S.A., which is moving its renewable fleet from feed-in tariffs toward direct participation in energy markets. Robens also outlines practical AI use cases Siemens Energy is working on, including root cause analysis, turbine tuning, incident response guidance, and operational agents for control room staff, and he describes a demonstration with Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, that achieved 72 hours of unmanned operation at a power plant. Topics covered in this episode: • Why power generation is becoming more heterogeneous • Renewables as critical infrastructure • Why trusted control and cybersecurity matter more in the age of AI • How an ecosystem approach connects assets, data, applications, and workflows • Practical AI use cases for plant operations • Progress toward autonomous operation

In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Sandeep Kumar Gupta, sales director with Siemens Energy Gas Services, and Naira Elsayed, a senior project manager with Elsewedy Electric Power Systems Projects (PSP), discuss the Rabigh Reinforcement Combined Cycle Power Plant, a finalist for a 2026 POWER Top Plant Award. The 1,179-MW plant sits on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, about 135 kilometers north of Jeddah, in a region that carries some of the Kingdom’s heaviest summer load. The project reached first fire in July 2025, roughly 14 months after the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract was awarded, and logged 12 million man-hours with no lost-time injuries. Gupta and Elsayed describe how early execution activities moved ahead while broader contractual arrangements were still being finalized, and what that took in trust and risk management among Siemens Energy, Elsewedy Electric PSP, and the Saudi Electricity Company. They explain how the team responded when Red Sea shipping disruptions made vessels hard to find, arranging a special voyage for the gas turbine generators and rerouting a 380-ton steam turbine generator around the Cape of Good Hope. They also cover recruiting and training skilled labor in a crowded market, building a safety culture around shared responsibility, the project’s F-class gas turbines and 3x1 multi-shaft configuration, Siemens Energy’s expanded EPC role, and the lessons they say other projects can take from Rabigh. For more on the project, read POWER’s article, “Beyond the Contract: How Rabigh Reinforcement Reached First Fire 14 Months After Award,” at https://www.powermag.com/beyond-the-contract-how-rabigh-reinforcement-reached-first-fire-14-months-after-award.

Utilities and independent power producers have spent years adding sensors to their generating fleets and creating dashboards to view what they relay. But visibility into how a plant is operating isn’t the same as knowing what to do about it—and that gap is where Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Management System is increasingly shedding light, explained two of the company’s experts as guests on The POWER Podcast. “Monitoring is just telling you what’s happening,” said Sarah Dietrich-Smith, Siemens Energy’s commercialization manager for Omnivise Energy Market and Fleet Management Solutions, “and Energy Management is telling you what should happen next, and it helps you to execute that decision,” she explained. The distinction, she said, is the real difference between tracking a plant’s condition and actually optimizing it—moving “from just this visibility to true optimization that you can actually take action on, and optimization that’s based and tied to measurable business outcomes.” From Single Assets to Whole Fleets Katie Hanley, head of Siemens Energy’s Omnivise Energy Market and Fleet Management Solutions team, framed Energy Management as fundamentally a question of business outcomes. Given a plant’s generation commitments, gas hedging position, and access to additional electricity markets, “What are the optimized economics for running your plant or your fleet?” she asked. “Historically, assets were managed individually. They really only cared about the question, ‘How can we get the single asset to perform better?’ ” Dietrich-Smith said. “We want to move into a fleet optimization mindset.” One plant might be constrained while another has more flexibility—sometimes for regional reasons, such as differing prices or curtailment risk in different markets. “This fleet-level approach is what’s going to help operators allocate flexibility, manage this risk, and ultimately optimize the commercial performance across the full portfolio,” she said, “instead of just making that isolated asset or site-level decision.” Dietrich-Smith also pushed back on a common assumption about where the value comes from. “I think the most common misconception is that the only value we’re bringing is efficiency improvement,” she said. Customers also see fewer penalties, more effective participation in electricity markets, and faster response to changing conditions—benefits she summed up simply: “Time is money.” Renewables Complicate the Math A growing share of that fleet-level complexity traces back to renewables, Hanley said, whether a customer operates a hybrid portfolio directly or simply competes in a market where renewable penetration is rising. She described thinking in terms of dispatchable versus non-dispatchable generation: as more renewables come online, dispatchable options become scarcer, making it harder to maintain grid stability—and more important to predict when instability might occur. That prediction problem pulls in weather and market data alike, from cloud cover and wind speeds at different altitudes to real-time electricity prices. For a hybrid site with battery storage, the same data informs decisions about when to charge from onsite generation versus the grid, and when to discharge—sometimes purely to arbitrage low prices rather than to support the site’s own generation. “These batteries are creating dispatchable flexibility when normally we would only be able to do that with some of our large gas assets,” Hanley said, adding that customers are increasingly weighing a battery discharge against ramping up a plant or duct burning, based on which is the better economic call in the moment. Hanley closed the conversation on a practical note for listeners still weighing where to start. “Everything is only getting more complex, so give us a call,” she said.

Public power utilities have long promised lower bills, reliable service, and decisions made close to home—and the data still backs that up. But holding that ground is getting harder. In this episode of The POWER Podcast, Scott Corwin, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), talks about the forces now testing the community-owned utility model. Corwin explains why resource adequacy, reliability, and affordability have converged into the defining challenge for APPA's roughly 2,000 member systems—a concern that once affected only certain regions but now stretches across nearly the entire membership. He breaks down the tools public power uses to keep rates down, including tax-exempt financing and elective pay credits, and why local control itself acts as a check on spending. The conversation also digs into the issues reshaping the sector: how smaller utilities are evaluating massive data center interconnection requests while protecting ratepayers; why Corwin describes public power's generation strategy as "any of the above" rather than "all of the above"; and the structural headwinds—permitting delays, an aging workforce, supply chain strain, and cybersecurity—that determine what utilities can build and how fast. Corwin closes with what he most wants policymakers to understand about community-owned utilities, and the value of 2,000 diverse communities speaking with one voice on affordability and reliability. Listen to the full conversation to hear how public power is navigating one of the most dynamic periods the industry has faced in years.

A perfect storm is brewing across the U.S. power generation fleet. Between 600 and 700 GE 7FA gas turbines installed during the bubble of 2000–2004—plus roughly 900 7EA units worldwide—are simultaneously approaching the OEM's 144,000-hour, 5,000-start end-of-life threshold. Superalloy forgings carry multi-year lead times. Only a handful of shops worldwide can service these machines. And the data center boom is pushing utilization higher than anyone planned for. In this episode, we sit down with three MD&A leaders driving the company's push to become an independent alternative for 7FA and 7EA rotor life extensions: • Dave Fernandes — Gas Turbine Program Manager • Kevin Roy — Principal Engineer, Parts • Jason Wheeler — Gas Turbine Rotor Repairs General Manager We trace the story from MD&A's early-2010s strategic pivot out of steam turbines and into gas turbines under then-CEO John Vanderhoef, through the acquisition of two never-fired machines—a 7FA.03 and a 7EA—that became the foundation of the reverse engineering effort. Kevin Roy explains why zero-hour components were essential, and why CMM and blue-light scanning only get you so far: coatings, shot peening, and surface finishes demand hands-on expertise no laser can replicate. We dig into the global hunt for vendors capable of producing high-temperature alloy forgings and holding tolerances on turbine-section components—a niche capability MD&A continues to expand for supply chain redundancy. Jason Wheeler walks through the quality regime: first-article scrutiny that carries into every production batch, with inspection standards more rigorous than what these vendors typically face elsewhere. The conversation turns to MD&A's seed rotor exchange program—modeled on its successful 7FH2 generator program—designed to compress customer downtime to removal, swap, and reinstall, with returned rotors entering the refurbishment cycle for the next customer. We also unpack what Fernandes calls "the three prongs": fleet-wide timing, multi-year forging lead times, and limited shop capacity worldwide. The conclusion is uncomfortable for operators who haven't started planning—parts needed three to five years from now must enter production today. Finally, we cover the milestone currently in MD&A's St. Louis shop: the first 7FA.03 rotor purchased specifically for the seed rotor program to complete the full production cycle, with newly manufactured wheels stacking perfectly alongside original serviceable components. And we discuss the 2026 delivery of a life-extended 7FA.03 rotor to a leading U.S. power producer—a vote of confidence from a famously risk-averse industry. Whether you're a utility planner staring down rotor end-of-life on your 7FA fleet, an asset manager weighing OEM dependence against supply chain risk, or an industry watcher tracking how independents are reshaping heavy-duty gas turbine services, this episode lays out where the bottlenecks are, what's been done about them, and why the window to act is narrowing fast.