What It Takes

They keep their eyes on the big picture

Behind all the elaborate machinery that helps OPPD’s Nebraska City Station and North Omaha Station generate power is a group of seasoned professionals in a high-stakes job.

Unit operators are essentially the pilots-in-command at the stations, OPPD’s two coal-fired generation plants. While engineers and other specialists maintain thousands of components in both facilities, unit operators control it all from secure rooms filled with dozens of monitors and switches.

The job requires quick thinking, a mechanical mind, effective multi-tasking and excellent communication skills, all built through years of experience.

“You never know what you’re going to be doing,” said Jake Hurley, a unit operator at Nebraska City Station. “It’s all dictated by whatever is happening within the plant. It keeps things entertaining. I’ve been at some jobs where it’s just the same thing all the time, and that gets boring. That’s not this.”

Every day, both plants use coal to produce super-heated steam, which spins turbine blades at 3,600 RPM. Each turbine rotates a generator, which creates an electrical current to power eastern Nebraska.

Solving problems

Unit operators work in 12-hour shifts around-the-clock, year-round, alternating between daytime and nights.

In the control rooms, they oversee complex machinery with hundreds of sensors, alarms and settings to optimize. Phones ring from neighboring control rooms and OPPD’s Energy Marketing & Trading team. Radios crackle with calls from workers throughout the plant, reporting items that need attention. At least one person must remain in the control room at all times.

Unit operators start their shift with a briefing from the departing unit operator, along with supervisors and equipment operators.

Years of experience guide their work. Walking through the plant, unit operators often recognize the smallest of problems: A hissing steam leak. A valve that sounds funny. An unusual smell.

“You get to know what stuff looks like, the sounds and smells of everything out there,” said Tyler Long, an assistant unit operator at Nebraska City Station. “If something’s different, you’re hopefully going to notice.”

Every unit operator starts as an entry-level helper, whose job is to learn and assist in the plants when needed. Helpers eventually advance to auxiliary operators, assistant equipment operators and equipment operators. From there, they can become assistant unit operators and unit operators. Every step builds to the next.

Unit operators work closely with OPPD’s Energy Marketing & Trading team to help get the best deals possible within the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), a multistate coalition of utilities that buy and sell power to one another to ensure regional reliability and competitive prices.

If some piece of machinery isn’t working, unit operators tell energy marketers so they can plan accordingly. If units are available and prices are high, unit operators can ramp up production so that OPPD can sell energy into the market.

Big responsibilities

If something goes wrong and a unit trips offline, unit operators review the unit’s electronic data to try to pinpoint the problem.

Other times, everything will look fine on the screens, but an equipment operator in the plant will notice something out of sorts – a puddle of oil, or flickering embers from loose coal.

“I always try to learn and stay in the loop with what’s going on,” Long said. “You have to have a questioning attitude all the time.”

Great care is also needed when the SPP calls on its member utilities to operate more conservatively than normal to ensure reliable power throughout the region. Keeping units running can be critical in those moments, so unit operators may tell workers to hold off on maintenance that could accidentally trip a unit offline.

“If there’s any doubt whatsoever, we’ll just wait until another time,” Hurley said. “Somebody’s got to keep pushing power.”

Constant learning

The job requires constant learning.

Turning on a generator requires dozens of steps. Pressures and readings must fall within the correct range. The ramp-up must be smooth and gradual, similar to a car warming up on a frigid morning. A gentle startup protects fragile parts.

“It’s not just flipping a switch and turning it on,” Hurley said. “There’s a series of events that has to happen and you have to do it in the right order.”

Hurley came to OPPD from a control-room job at Bunge North America, a soybean processing facility that makes cooking oils for major restaurants and biodiesel fuels.

“There was a learning curve when I came here, but I had a lot of experience in plants and a pretty good understanding of pumps and valves and things of that nature,” he said. “We had smaller boilers, so I understood some of those basic principles, but nothing of this magnitude.

“It still amazes me sometimes. Just when you think you have a good grasp on what you know, something else comes up and challenges you.”

As a student at Southeast Community College, Long discovered what was then a new power plant generation program in Milford. The curriculum covered all types of generation, from coal to natural gas to wind. Long interned at North Omaha Station, then joined OPPD full -time in 2012.

“I was always kind of interested in energy,” he said.

Sacrifices and rewards

Unit operators are essential to keeping power flowing efficiently to all OPPD customers, said Jeremy Kellner, manager of operations at Nebraska City Station.

“They’re vital to the operation,” Kellner said. “They’re like the captain of the ship.”

The job has its challenges, of course. With high stakes come necessary sacrifices.

“This is serious work,” Hurley said. “You really have to take that into consideration before you take this job. You’re going to miss holidays; you’re going to miss Christmases, the Fourth of July and family time. You’re going to have to work around getting your kids out the door to school and going to bed.”

But the job is also rewarding, Hurley said, and an essential service for everyone in Nebraska and beyond.

“There are days when you look back and think, ‘Wow, today was a really busy day,’” he said. “But we were well-synched. Tyler handled this problem, I handled that one. We had good communication and made sure we didn’t put any of our guys in an unsafe situation. That’s a reward in itself. You walk out the door at the end of your shift and you think, ‘Today was a good day.’”