Voith hosts multi-day hydro training workshop that featured NHA’s Malcolm Woolf as keynote speaker

Woolf stressed the need for the industry to better promote hydropower’s contribution to the national electrical grid.

Voith Hydro North America recently hosted the Voith Hydro Training Workshop, an instructional event for hydropower owners and operators. It focused on the latest information and findings in hydropower digitalization and automation. The keynote speaker, National Hydropower Association President and CEO Malcolm Woolf, urged the attending professionals to promote reliably produced hydropower and raise its awareness as it competes against other, less-mature forms of renewable energy production.

“Hydropower continues to work as the foundation of our electrical grid, yet it gets very little support in regard to taxes and grants,” Woolf said when comparing it to solar and wind. “Because we are an older, more mature industry, we don’t get the credit we deserve for doing our job so well.”

Woolf pointed out how easy it is for the public to forget that hydropower is working for them every day. He recommended that hydropower facilities around the country invite their local leaders and U.S. congressional delegations for site tours every few years. The goal: To keep hydropower at the forefront of their minds as they craft policies that might affect the future of the industry.

Woolf spoke at the Voith-sponsored workshop, which took place over three days in York, Pennsylvania, the location of Voith Hydro North America’s headquarters. It featured numerous training sessions led by Voith Hydro and Voith Digital Ventures experts. More than 70 attendees joined Voith’s team for the event, and those visitors were also invited to tour Voith’s manufacturing facility and hydraulic test lab in West Manchester Township. A site tour of Muddy Run Pumped Storage Facility in nearby Drumore Township, Pennsylvania, was also part of the workshop. The Muddy Run tour came about through the generosity of Exelon, which made their site available as an added benefit to workshop attendees.

“As a training event, our goal was to educate hydropower owners and operators on the most up-to-date technology available to them,” said Inna Kremza, Principal Engineer, Customer Training Manager, Voith Hydro North America, who also organized the workshop. “Through numerous case studies and trend reports, we used the workshop to share the experiences and findings we’ve collected with the support of our customers.”

Sessions included generator design, maintenance, modernization and rehabilitation; turbine design, rehabilitation and modernization; digital solutions for hydropower; controls and network segmentation; safety by design; governor, exciter and protection for hydro plants; and case studies through Voith’s HyService and field work case studies. Through the workshop, networking opportunities were abundant, allowing attendees to interact with one another as well as Voith’s experts. Also available at the workshop was an augmented reality (AR) demonstration which showed how hydropower operators can use latest technology to assist with maintenance and regular operations.

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