Fossil Fuel Power Plant Simulators for Operator Training

Before the 1970 ́s the use of simulators to train the operation personnel of the power plants was not widely diffused. In these times, the operators acquire their skills by working head to head with some experienced operators in the actual plant, so they learned all the knowledge of their mentor, this means, all the virtues and defects of the experienced people. As expected, the trainees also receive the classic classroom lessons with the aim to complement their training. The training finished when the manager of the plant decided the trainee was ready to operate and control the plant. In the majority of the cases, the main problem of this kind of training was that the operator just learned the typical actions related with the start-up of the equipment and operation of the plant in nominal conditions. Therefore, operators had not been trained in abnormal situations, where they needed to act rapidly to keep the power plant in safety conditions. Naturally any operative mistake could lead to a unit trip, equipment damage or risk to staff with all the economic looses related with this type of problems. During the 1970 ́s, in the United States, the nuclear power industry made the commitment of including simulators as a part of the training programs of their nuclear power plant operators, gradually the use of simulators in the nuclear power industry gained worldwide acceptance. In 1979 a major accident occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 2 in Middletown, Pennsylvania resulted in a critical assessment of the preparedness of operations staff to respond to the accident. It is commonly believed that the incident at TMI would not have occurred if the operators had been properly trained. This accident prompted a complete re-evaluation of the nuclear industry's operator training programmes (Perkins, 1985). Events like this reinforced the growth of the rising industry of simulators and that extended its application to the fossil fuel power plants too. Specifically in this segment, the Electric Power Research Institute [EPRI] (1993) carried over a cost-benefit analysis of simulators used at fossil fuel power plants, where the identified benefits were: availability savings, thermal performance savings, component life savings, and environmental compliance savings. Additionally EPRI reported that approximately 20% of forced plant outages were direct result of operator or maintenance error. Therefore, reducing operator controllable outages through training on a simulator can significantly reduce operating costs. Additional quotes about operators errors (Serious Games LLC, 2006), establishes that “One manufacturing analyst estimated, human error leading to abnormal situations costs the UK process industry $1.4 billion a year” and “In the last 25 years,