Comprehensive solutions from regulatory compliance to replacing end-of-life equipment.
Today’s power-generating companies often lack enough resources in-house to tackle the many engineering challenges they face, including growing North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) compliance obligations, the replacement of aging equipment, updating protection and controls schemes and relay setting expertise.
TRC delivers a comprehensive portfolio of power generation engineering solutions to meet our clients’ most pressing needs. As your trusted project partner, we provide quality results and unmatched technical expertise from initial scoping through to project closeout.
TRC is here to help you design, maintain and manage safe and reliable power generation systems. Our extensive knowledge and expertise mean we can handle projects of any size, scope or complexity, delivering innovative solutions with the latest tools and technologies.
With core skills in electrical engineering, system protection, automation and studies, TRC’s engineers and project managers have extensive experience working in the generation industry. We provide a full range of engineering services, third-party reviews, protective relay training, construction oversight and post-modification testing and commissioning.
Our deep cultural focus on quality means we comply fully with station design and work control processes and ensure a seamless transition through all phases of a project.
With a rapidly evolving utility industry, you need reliable power generation systems that meet your customers’ demands and protect against future failures. TRC will work alongside your team as a true partner, assessing and upgrading equipment and facilities to strengthen and improve power plant facilities.
Our power plant engineering solutions include:
Through careful planning and execution, TRC helps clients meet both current and future energy demands. Detailed electrical plans and specifications ensure an efficient, reliable and compliant system. Our designs include:
Equipment protection schemes are crucial to the engineering process to safeguard critical equipment from damage while ensuring the safety and reliability of system components, such as:
TRC empowers your staff with efficient operation, monitoring and control of your power generation processes. We employ cutting-edge technologies and advanced communication methods like:
TRC conducts various analyses that contribute to the effective management of power generation facilities, including:
Evaluate the effectiveness of your power generation systems with independent evaluations conducted by TRC experts. We assess power plant design, performance or compliance and help identify potential issues or regulatory concerns.
TRC’s end-to-end oversight ensures every aspect of your power generation project is planned, organized and overseen successfully and on time. Our team can handle every challenge by monitoring progress and helping your team manage risks and control costs.
Our customized training educates personnel on how to operate and maintain protective relays that detect electrical faults and safeguard equipment from damage.
To ensure the reliability and security of the electric grid, your facility must comply with standards set by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, including Protection and Control (PRC) and Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP).Our NERC experts help you stay current with and understand the many compliance requirements across numerous standards families. We provide technical evaluations, audit support and training.
Embrace what’s possible with TRC. We look forward to advancing your power generation engineering project. Contact us to learn more.
Our practitioners share their insights and perspectives on the trends and challenges shaping the market.
Modernizing utility equipment, standards and processes pays dividends for improved safety, security and reliability. But transitioning to a new high-tech system model can be challenging.
Faced with an aging fleet, stricter environmental regulations, reduced costs for natural gas and competition from renewables, more than 600 power plants have been decommissioned in the last 20 years, a pace that will increase with the announced closure of nearly 350 additional plants by 2025.
TRC’s analysis for one client fleet shows that even a $70,000 EV can compete on cost with a comparable gas-hybrid vehicle priced at $40,000 – at least in California where upfront and ongoing incentives stack up quickly.
Today, TRC announced the expansion of its digital capabilities with the acquisition of Quatric, a Montreal, QC and Quincy, MA-based firm that provides engineering services and technology solutions to electric and gas utilities.
In a world where energy supply and consumption are becoming increasingly dynamic and complex, energy providers are still expected to maintain a standard of safe, reliable and resilient power delivery. Distributed energy resources (DERs) – small-scale units of local generation connected to the grid at the distribution level that often include battery storage, electric vehicles (EVs), EV charging stations and residential solar – and associated business models are proliferating at a staggering rate. Traditional utility customers are transitioning from interacting with consumers to networking with prosumers, and utilities are facing pressure to become more sophisticated as policymakers push to shrink carbon footprints. Under this lens, traditional utility planning tools are insufficient. These tools have not fully embraced the potential or the expansion of DERs within power networks, where the increased penetration of DERs has the capability to wreak havoc on grid resiliency. Whether it be photovoltaic plus battery storage or EVs and fleet charging, it is imperative to be able to assess the locational impact of each resource in a timely manner. Traditional planning tools leverage a brute force method, requiring a significant amount of an engineering time to conduct one-off studies. But dynamic network tools that quickly model parallel simulations become a necessity to validate load flow calculations and understand the dynamic hosting capacity on areas of the network. Planning tools need to become more automated and integrate better with the utility’s back office systems to help reduce the time required to conduct an engineering analysis. For certain utilities, using traditional tools to validate the network model and load flow calculations could require four to six hours per circuit, and in some cases more than 20 hours. Multiply that by 1,000 circuits – as well as adding in the complexity of optimization-based problems such as DER location, storage dispatch and hosting capacity – and utilities are faced with a significant amount of time required just to conduct the studies, let alone being able to use the results.
LOWELL, Mass. – TRC, a leading provider of end-to-end engineering, consulting and construction management solutions fueled by innovative technology, announced today it has acquired IJUS, a top power/utility engineering firm based in Gahanna, Ohio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
TRC is proud to support Huntington, NY bolster power reliability and climate-change resiliency with a sophisticated new “community microgrid’’ combining solar energy, a fuel cell, biogas and traditional natural gas to deliver electricity and heat to local customers and institutions.
