Collaborative delivery teams will often say that successful commissioning, startup, and planning begins as early as the design and preconstruction phase. But what happens when the owner hasn’t even hired the staff to run the new systems or when you reach a GMP agreement at 60% and not everyone is on the same page for what that plan should cost? There’s an easy solution—collaborate.
WSSC Water’s Piscataway Bioenergy Facility project in Accokeek, Maryland, was rapidly approaching the GMP submission at the 60% design milestone and there still wasn’t agreement between the owner, owner advisor, and the progressive design-build team on what value should be carried for commissioning and startup of the plant. When you consider that training alone consisted of over 10,000 hours of classroom training, it becomes clearer how challenging a task we had to price these activities. That task was further compounded by the vast number of systems (over 250) and schedule (16 months) involved in the process, as well as the fact that everyone’s roles had not yet been defined.
The answer at GMP delivery became very focused on collaboration. All parties agreed to carry an allowance in the GMP that would be used to get the job completed as a team. For the next 30 months, PC Construction, with our designers Stantec and Hazen and Sawyer, went to work writing, submitting, and perfecting the commissioning and start-up plans with WSSC Water and their owner advisor, HDR. This teamwork provided critical lessons learned that others should consider:
- Engage and maintain participation from all stakeholders throughout design.
- Bring the operations and maintenance staff into the discussion early.
- Ensure everyone has a clear understanding of the owner’s standards, terms, and expectations.
- Involve vendors early in the design process.
- Incorporate the systems integrator into the team.
- Set a “point of no return” for changes.
- Start the commissioning committee as early in design as possible.
With design complete and construction in full swing, the entire integrated commissioning team—from design-builder and engineers to the owner and their advisor—was hard at work on the intricate details of commissioning.
Training became a schedule challenge, ensuring operators received training as close to taking over plant operations as possible while minimizing the overwhelming volume of information. To address that challenge, we set parameters around how many training topics and sessions could be scheduled in any given week. We planned engineer of record (EOR) system training prior to any specific vendor equipment training and, contractually, we planned two EOR training sessions on each system. Working with the plant operations team, we planned one session prior to the plant taking over operations and the second as a refresher course after they had been operating the plant for a few months. When it came time to schedule the additional EOR training, the plant staff was already extremely confident and didn’t feel additional training was necessary due in large part to the collaboration and inclusive planning prior to turnover.
Seeding the digesters was the point of no return for the commissioning team. Once the digesters were seeded, all the biological processes would start and need to be maintained and nurtured. The team carefully planned the digester seeding and ramp-up process with a focus on how to seed and acclimate the sidestream system to ensure the digesters were adequately fed while the sidestream system was not overfed. This planning required all parties to consider how the plant would be operated during this period, how quickly the plant could accept solids from other facilities and how quickly the thermal hydrolysis process could be ramped up. All decisions impacted WSSC Water’s operations both at the Piscataway WRRF site and the other facilities.
Once the commissioning process started, the team had daily huddles to discuss operations, make joint decisions about changes based on plant data, and plan our next steps.
The benefits to this process were many, including the following:
- Cooperative problem-solving benefited the project.
- Owner’s operators had high confidence in taking over operations due to their involvement throughout the process.
- Transparency resulted in a smooth process and transition to owner’s staff.
- Communication was heightened and open.
And here we are, successfully through the commissioning and start-up process. This complex of an effort would not have achieved such exceptional results without the progressive design-build model and a six-year collaboration among all parties from design through startup.