Technical Personnel for Hydroelectric Power Plants

The capacity of the plant, the capacity of the plant versus the grid stability, the degree of plant automation and remote control, the dam operation, can the dam gates be remotely controlled, spillway capacity, all contribute to determine the staffing levels at any time.

If a plant is small (less then 10MW) in comparision to the grid, automated and does not have trash build-up then a daily operator check of plant and trash racks may be adequate. During bad weather, spring run-off, ice, leaves, trash handling or for environmental monitoring may require one or two operators. The location of the power plant, proximity to operations staff or if remotely dispatched operator call-in response time. The dam criticality, flash flood potential, response time of operators all get into creating an answer.

Twenty years ago, I've seen 60MW plants that were controlled remotely, with an operator on site during at least part of the day to clean-up, clean trash racks and monitor for efficient production and any environmental testing, as above extraordinary conditions requires more operators.

At some MW the lost revenue during an outage call-in and the lack of automation will justify full time operator(s). Today it is still less expensive to put in sensing and automation, more cameras and communications then an operator.

Mechanical or Electrical Maintenance staff are typically not on-site, but roving to plant outages for repairs on a scheduled basis and at other plants for emergency repairs.

Hello everybody:

CoronaCameraMan, thanks for your valuable comments.