Michael Lukas Breaks New Ground

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Michael Lukas has always loved work­ing in the ener­gy sec­tor. At the Lausitz Energie Kraftwerke AG (LEAG) pow­er plant in Boxberg, he is respon­si­ble for high-volt­age tech­nol­o­gy and elec­tri­cal pro­tec­tion. “High-volt­age tech­nol­o­gy – just the name is excit­ing!” says Lukas with a grin. His enthu­si­asm for the field began right at the start of his career in 1981, when he start­ed an appren­tice­ship as an elec­tri­cian at the Boxberg pow­er plant.

Just under ten years lat­er he com­plet­ed a degree in elec­tri­cal and automa­tion engi­neer­ing, before going on to do anoth­er degree in mecha­tron­ic sys­tems at the start of the 2000s. Up to that point, he had been work­ing pri­mar­i­ly in the field of ener­gy gen­er­a­tion and get­ting to know every last detail of the process­es in that area. In 2004, after com­plet­ing his sec­ond degree, he then switched from oper­a­tions man­age­ment to tech­ni­cal ser­vice. Today, he has over­all respon­si­bil­i­ty for main­tain­ing all of LEAG’s trans­form­ers.

Lukas explains the chal­lenges that come with his role: “My job is to ensure that we plan main­te­nance strate­gi­cal­ly and car­ry out main­te­nance activ­i­ties at the best pos­si­ble time. Instead of plan­ning our main­te­nance activ­i­ties based on time as we did ten years ago, we now plan on the basis of the actu­al wear.” In order to actu­al­ly imple­ment this in prac­tice, how­ev­er, Lukas needs reli­able, high-qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion about the con­di­tion of all trans­form­ers.

To this end, he has been work­ing close­ly with MR since 2006. Back then, the part­ner­ship began with a com­pli­ca­tion relat­ing to a tap chang­er. “Of course that wasn’t a par­tic­u­lar­ly fun expe­ri­ence. But right from the start, I was impressed at the open­ness of the MR employ­ees and their abil­i­ty to respond pos­i­tive­ly to crit­i­cism. This meant that deal­ing with a com­pli­ca­tion quick­ly evolved into a for­ward-look­ing part­ner­ship.”

Discussing Every Detail

As a result of this col­lab­o­ra­tion, Lukas and his col­leagues start­ed off by installing the TAPGUARD® 260 mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem on a pilot trans­former to mon­i­tor the func­tions of the tap chang­er. After inten­sive train­ing and dis­cus­sions at MR, LEAG put the sys­tem through its paces. Through­out the process, Lukas fre­quent­ly went back to MR with queries and sug­ges­tions for the pre­cise con­fig­u­ra­tion of the con­trol cab­i­net.

Thorsten Krüger, Direc­tor of Dig­i­tal Ven­tures at MR, recalls the expe­ri­ence: “It was a chal­leng­ing task, but we were impressed by the lev­el of detail we could go into when dis­cussing the sys­tem and its pre­cise func­tions with Mr. Lukas and LEAG. It is pre­cise­ly this type of exchange that makes our rela­tion­ship so fruit­ful on both sides.”

“Now, thanks to the system’s excel­lent mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ties, we can be more flex­i­ble.”Michael Lukas, who is respon­si­ble for high-volt­age tech­nol­o­gy and elec­tri­cal pro­tec­tion at LEAG

Once Lukas was com­plete­ly con­vinced by the TAPGUARD®’s abil­i­ties, he had the sys­tem installed on all machine trans­form­ers at LEAG’s pow­er plants and added the TAPGUARD® to the spec­i­fi­ca­tion for new trans­form­ers. “The sys­tem has already proven its worth in prac­tice,” he says. “There was a case when it was trig­gered because there were irregular­ities dur­ing switch­ing which came from the mech­anics rather than from the tap chang­er itself. Based on this infor­ma­tion we were able to, in the first instance, keep a 500 MW pow­er plant unit run­ning with a 600 MVA trans­former and then bring it to a con­trolled stop in order to rec­ti­fy the prob­lem.

Monitoring for the Entire Fleet

After a while it became evi­dent that, although there were advan­tages to be gained from Mon­i­tor­ing the on-load tap-chang­ers with the TAPGUARD, LEAG required a more exten­sive sys­tem to keep an eye on its entire fleet in line with its for­ward-look­ing main­te­nance strat­e­gy. Up to that point, Lukas had been work­ing with var­i­ous sys­tems to keep an eye on the oil in the trans­form­ers, the tap chang­ers, cool­ing sys­tems, and high-volt­age bush­ings – but he lacked a sys­tem that would col­lect and con­sol­i­date all of the infor­ma­tion and then issue a rec­om­mend­ed action.

When MR sug­gest­ed com­bin­ing the TRAFOGUARD® with the TESSA® fleet mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem, Lukas was keen to find out more. “The deci­sion to take the next step and break new ground is always dri­ven by curios­i­ty,” explains Lukas. “I want to find out what the sys­tem can do and whether it will help me and the com­pa­ny. Then I take a close look at the promised ben­e­fits to see whether the sys­tem deliv­ers on the promise.”

As a large num­ber of sys­tems and sen­sors from MR and oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers have been installed on LEAG’s trans­form­ers over the years, it was cru­cial for Lukas that the sys­tem was able to process the input from var­i­ous man­u­fac­tur­ers’ com­po­nents. “The close col­lab­o­ra­tion with LEAG and Mr. Lukas suits my team’s new way of work­ing very well,” says Thorsten Krüger.

His Dig­i­tal Ven­tures depart­ment is increas­ing­ly using agile meth­ods and mov­ing away from the idea of defin­ing a fixed project plan and then implement­ing it rigid­ly from begin­ning to end. Instead, the focus is on includ­ing the cus­tomer in the process at an ear­ly stage in order to obtain impor­tant feed­back. “Even when we know the cus­tomer well, there is still a chance we will devel­op fea­tures that they don’t actu­al­ly con­sid­er par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant. Main­tain­ing a close dia­log like the one we have with LEAG is an effi­cient way to cre­ate solu­tions that pro­vide real cus­tomer ben­e­fits.”

Valuable Experience

When it came to the imple­men­ta­tion of the TRAFOGUARD® and TESSA® sys­tem, Michael Lukas once again pro­vid­ed detailed feed­back at all stages of devel­op­ment. For exam­ple, he sug­gest­ed using a dif­fer­ent method than the one pro­posed by MR to cal­cu­late an aver­age val­ue. “I have gained expe­ri­ence from day-to-day oper­a­tion that I can pass on,” says Lukas.

“I am very grate­ful that I am able to do that, par­tic­u­lar­ly in such a trust­ing work­ing rela­tion­ship. It’s just nice to be under­stood.” Krüger adds: “We’ve known each oth­er for long enough now to know that a sug­ges­tion like that is based on a wealth of expe­ri­ence and is def­i­nite­ly worth look­ing at in more detail. In that par­tic­u­lar case, we imple­ment­ed the sug­gest­ed method in the sys­tem straight away.”

Lukas and his col­leagues are now using the TRAFOGUARD® and TESSA® in their fleet. Lukas par­tic­u­lar­ly val­ues the system’s abil­i­ty to fil­ter and sort a huge quan­ti­ty of infor­ma­tion and alert the user to poten­tial prob­lems with excep­tion­al pre­ci­sion. In this way, the sys­tem is help­ing Lukas to imple­ment the par­a­digm shift in the main­te­nance strat­e­gy.

“Right from the start,I was impressed at the open­ness of the MR employ­ees.”Michael Lukas

“Pre­vi­ous­ly, we took each trans­former offline at a set time in order to car­ry out main­te­nance. Now, thanks to the system’s excel­lent mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ties, we can be more flex­i­ble. We can now respond more effec­tive­ly to the needs of the mar­ket with regard to flex­i­ble pow­er gen­er­a­tion – after all, the mar­ket doesn’t care about fixed main­te­nance times.” MR is cur­rent­ly work­ing close­ly with LEAG on the next stage of devel­op­ment for TESSA®, with the aim of bring­ing even more flex­i­bil­i­ty to the company’s main­te­nance activ­i­ties.

Learning Together

aving an oppor­tu­ni­ty to share expe­ri­ences is some­thing that is very close to Lukas’s heart: “As a young engi­neer, I often found myself think­ing ’I can’t be the only one fac­ing this chal­lenge’.” At this point LEAG was still part of Vat­ten­fall. He there­fore estab­lished a reg­u­lar plat­form for shar­ing expe­ri­ences relat­ing to trans­form­ers with col­leagues from oth­er Vat­ten­fall sites.

When LEAG was found­ed, this oppor­tu­ni­ty was no longer avail­able so Lukas decid­ed to set up the “Ober­lausitzer Energie-Sym­­po­sium” (Upper Lusa­tia Ener­gy Sym­po­sium) in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Zittau/Görlitz Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences. The first event took place in 2017 and the next one is sched­uled for 2019. “For me, it is impor­tant to be able to pass on my expe­ri­ence and learn from oth­ers. You don’t have to rein­vent the wheel every time you come up against a Prob­lem – you can ben­e­fit from exist­ing approach­es.”

Open dia­log will also con­tin­ue to be the cor­nerstone of the part­ner­ship between LEAG and MR. Krüger says: “We con­sid­er our­selves lucky to have cus­tomers like LEAG and Mr. Lukas. His crit­i­cal, fair, and well-found­ed ideas and sug­ges­tions help us to devel­op and improve togeth­er.” Lukas is also look­ing for­ward to their con­tin­ued col­lab­o­ra­tion. He sums up his atti­tude to the future with an alter­na­tive slo­gan for his com­pa­ny: “LEAG – as far as I’m con­cerned, it could just as eas­i­ly stand for ’learn, engage, act, and grow’.