Plant location resource planning

The benefits to be accrued from the implementation of a program of planned maintenance can be found in the efficient and economical operation of the plant and equipment and the utilization of resources (i.e. plant and equipment and manpower) while also maintaining a sound standard of safe working and environmental conditions for operators, other occupants and employees within the workplace. Maintenance systems vary, depending on the location of the plant and equipment and/or company policy. Systems can range from the complete maintenance of plant and equipment using all available methods to their replacement on failure. To meet the company s requirements it is then necessary to decide on the maintenance system that provides the most satisfactory benefits overall. 

In scheduling the assets and work tasks to be carried out it is recommended that the plant room and department that require the greatest resources (i.e. man-hours) should be entered on the planning schedule first. The scheduling for each item of plant and equipment follows the same pattern in that the location (e.g. boiler-house) is entered as a heading, then the assets and their asset numbers are entered for each specified location. 

From a spatial perspective, the characteristic of both wind and solar is that they are diffuse resources. This results in projects spread over areas as least as large as fossil-fuel power plants. For wind, the other important characteristic is that it is site specific, so that a wind resource must be developed exactly on the site where sufficient wind is available it cannot be moved to a more convenient location. This implies built-in potential for direct conflicts with whatever may exist already in the same place. A third salient consideration is that no matter how the wind turbines are designed, painted, erected, or spaced to make them less obtmsive or annoying, they cannot be made invisible. Consequently, controversy over their deployment should have been anticipated. One of the best-known examples of such controversy is found near Palm Springs, California (Pasqualetti, 2001, 2002). Two others, less familiar, include the proposal for the Isle of Lewis, in the U.K. and another planned for La Venta, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. 

---