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Guatemala: dry-season outages cut by more than half.

A 300 MW thermal plant kept losing hours when capacity prices peak. We tied every trip to a root cause and rebuilt maintenance around real failure rates.

Full 300 MW capacity payment captured for the first time in three years.

MW capacity payment, in full

PlantThermal, 300 MW
CountryGuatemala
RoleOutage and maintenance strategy
ResultOutage hours down by more than half

  1. Situation

    A 300 MW thermal plant was losing generation hours to unplanned outages during the dry season, exactly when the grid operator pays the highest capacity prices. Maintenance was scheduled on a fixed calendar rather than on actual wear, and no one owned the trip data across shifts, so the same failures kept recurring.

  2. What we did

    We set up a single outage log that tied every trip to its root cause and repair cost, then used six months of that data to rebuild the preventive-maintenance calendar around actual failure rates instead of the OEM’s generic defaults. We also worked with procurement to rebuild the critical-spares list so the parts behind the longest outages were the ones kept on-site instead of on order.

  3. What changed

    Unplanned outage hours during the following dry season fell by more than half, and the plant captured its full 300 MW capacity payment for the first time in three years.

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