Customising the Partnership – Standardising the Delivery: Driving mutual benefits in outsource energy partnerships

摘要

How does a small New Zealand energy company drive mutual benefits from outsourced energy partnerships with a diverse mix of industry partners and customised asset base? Pioneer Generation Limited (Pioneer) is a New Zealand based, community trust owned, generation company that has assets with a replacement value of $500m. A number of these are deeply embedded within, and are integral to, our Partners' core processes. The mix of assets Pioneer owns and/or manages are quite diverse ranging from regional electrical networks, thermal direct heat and energy, hydro and wind generation, as well as a number of standby reciprocating generators. The company's asset management challenge is to ensure we have a consistent approach to managing and optimising our asset performance coupled with a need to have our outsource partners share our asset management journey to achieve our mutual and separate business goals. Pioneer has grown considerably over the last 18 months, almost doubling our asset base with the purchase and integration of the Energy for Industry (EFI) business 12 months ago. A number of the key Pioneer assets, particularly the hydro stations, date back over 50 years and a number of the assets that came with the EFI business are nearing mid-life. Pioneer's goals include building on EFI's successful Build Own Operate (BOO) energy model which has seen EFI form a number of successful long term energy partnerships since the company's formation over 10 years ago. This paper explores these challenges with particular focus on: How we develop and deliver asset management customised to each of our assets and energy partners while being sufficiently generic and nimble to enable economic delivery across a distributed, embedded and relatively small asset base. The significance of knowledge management to our staff and contractors and how this continues to drive improvements in information capture and sharing across the wider organisation. How we are improving our business to recognise and address potential tensions with our customers and maintain their confidence in our asset management as these assets age and approach the end of their contracted lives.