Turf battles: GE makes a pitch for aftermarket of Siemens, Mitsubishi gas turbines

GE’s Power Services business has unveiled a range of products and services targeting gas turbine fleets of other OEMs, including Siemens’ and Mitsubishi’s SGT-800 and 501F units. GE also announced more than $200 million in gas turbine cross-fleet orders backlog.

Scott Strazik, president and CEO of GE’s Power Services business, said: “We’re benefiting from the extensive steam turbine, generator and HRSG other-OEM capabilities and expertise we acquired from Alstom’s power business in November 2015. We’ve combined all of these attributes and broadened our capabilities to now include select cross-fleet gas turbines. With more than $200 million in backlog orders in Latin America and Europe now booked, the timing makes sense to unveil our capabilities externally.”

This expertise includes applying insights from GE’s F-class gas turbines, amassed from 50 million operating hours, to develop new hardware components that deliver better performance and services that reduce downtime. Patented and proprietary GE technologies such as advanced coatings, stronger alloys and enhanced cooling in turbine and combustion components help extend maintenance intervals and increase performance output, says GE. Plus, reliability enhancements will help reduce risk during extended intervals.

GE says it has completed several outages at 501F power plants, spanning inspection services on all major plant components and systems. Its claimed 501F capabilities include:

• Increased intervals of up to 32,000 hours/1,250 starts (for fewer combustion inspections).
• More output and better efficiency in both simple-cycle and combined-cycle operations.
• Improved emissions with lower turndown and fuel flexibility.

GE has also signed several long-term agreements to provide maintenance and performance upgrades for SGT-800 turbines. Its capabilities in this fleet include:

• Significantly extended maintenance intervals up to 40,000 hours/900 starts.
• Increased output by up to 6 percent and efficiency up to 1.5 percent.

“GE’s Predix-based APM software applications give customers advanced data analytics to help predict and eliminate unplanned downtime, as well as improve plant reliability and availability,” adds O’Neill. “This software helps predict potential problems on both GE and non-GE equipment, avoid costly unplanned outages and increase plant flexibility.”