GE’s Jebel Ali Service Center is an $11m facility located in Dubai to serve the Middle East and African markets. ISAAC ANYAOGU joined officials of the company and other journalists on a tour of the facility and finds that the facility can help dent Nigeria’s power challenges by optimising poorly performing assets and following the scheduled maintenance plan.
Driving through the manicured streets of Dubai, with the shiny roads and edifices that seemed built for Instagram pictures, one gets used to expecting excellence from just about everything.
GE’s Jebel Ali Service Center which provides state-of-the-art maintenance, testing, and repairs solutions for generators and gas turbines, did not disappoint.
Completed in 2006 and covering over 4,000 square meters, GE’s Jebel Ali Service Center houses two workshops – one each for gas turbines and generators. Coming from a country where regular electricity is still a dream, the first impulse is to rip up the plant and move it to Lagos.
However, that will do little to solve Nigeria’s power challenges. Africa’s biggest economy is powered by diesel generators as the 4,000MW the grid serves when it is functional, is not even enough to power Lagos. Yet, the biggest takeaway from the facility tour is that Nigeria’s power challenges are not impossible to solve and it starts by ensuring that current assets are delivering at maximum capacity.
GE’s Jebel Ali Service Center’s pitch is that it can help plant owners who have invested billions of dollars in gas power plants around the Middle East and Africa (MEA), improve the operational performance of these assets.
The company believes that the right services provided at the right time can help keep gas turbines running reliably and efficiently over their entire lifespans, which typically extend to 20-30 years or even longer and several experiences have proven this to be true.
To this end, GE invited some journalists on a tour of the facility to preview the services offered for gas turbines and other power generation equipment through its Jebel Ali Service Center and Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Center in Dubai,
UAE, to help keep powering the future of energy.
The tour was led by Joseph Anis, President & CEO of GE Gas Power Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); Otmane Benamar, Acting Chief Technology Officer of GE Gas Power EMEA; and Kenneth Oyakhire, Services Leader of GE Gas Power Sub-Saharan
Africa (SSA).
It is interesting to see how much effort goes into revamping the components of machines to extend the lifespan of the assets. Benamar says that in most cases, this activity coupled with regularly scheduled maintenance can ensure that customers optimise the use of their assets while extending their lifespan.
Over the years, the Jebel Ali Center has served more than 80 customers from over 35 countries from east to west, including Nigeria. The Center services equipment built by both GE and
other Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM). The facility offers advanced maintenance, testing, and repair solutions.
The only GE facility of its kind throughout MEA, it offers the advantage of delivering faster services at competitive costs to customers in the region and beyond, while operating to the same high-quality standards found at GE’s facilities globally.
Led by a team of expert professionals, the site has global ISO 9001 quality, as well as ISO 14001 environment, health, and safety (EHS) certifications.
Joseph Anis said, “GE’s Jebel Ali Service Center offers a full breadth of offerings for the power sector to
meet the increasing need for reliable, efficient, and sustainable electricity for a growing population.
Our core focus is on supporting our customers to ensure the seamless operations of their assets by providing swift maintenance and repair services distinguished by our commitment to quality, productivity, cost-effectiveness, and EHS standards.”
The diverse breadth of repair offerings at the Center covers gas turbines and generators. On-site services include blade replacement and repairs, machining repairs, generator rotor seal oil journal repairs, stator rewinds, and other core maintenance. It is also GE’s only high-speed balancing facility and dynamic electrical testing center for rotors in MEA.
GE’s Dubai Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Center
The imposing facility with its wide screens is a high-tech equipment monitoring facility. The Center’s experts work with customers to increase uptime while reducing operations and maintenance expenses. Currently, more than 950 power-producing utilities use the M&D Center’s monitoring services for over 6,000 power plant assets around the world.
For the three hours spent at the facility, the operators logged in several calls attending to customer queries even as the tour proceeded. “There’s no downtime at,” says Oyakhire.
Every day, the Center receives over 1 million data points per second, coming from thousands of sensors attached to monitored assets. By providing a real-time view of asset data, the Center enables more effective, collaborative trouble-shooting with experts, enhancing the ability to forecast and prevent power outages through predictive maintenance alerts, and providing customized solutions.
“Our investment in the M&D Center is part of our continued efforts to drive the digital transformation of the power sector and leverage data and insights to support today’s dynamic energy market,” explains Anis. “It is critical to have asset visibility 24/7 and make data-driven decisions so we can ultimately serve the community better by meeting their electricity needs more reliably.”
GE and energy transition
The global energy sector’s shift from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption — including oil, natural gas, and coal — to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, as well as lithium-ion batteries has implications for companies including GE.
However, GE is preparing for this future. Already the company has essentially been divided into three divisions – Aerospace, GE Healthcare and GE Vernova.
GE Vernova is the power and renewable energy business that boasts of a third of its technology involved in the world’s generated electricity. It has installed over 7,000 gas turbines and 52 thousand wind turbines in 35 countries.
The increasing penetration of renewable energy into the energy supply mix, the onset of electrification, and improvements in energy storage are all key drivers of the energy transition. GE seeks to play in all these spaces, including onshore and offshore wind, hydro, storage and hybris, grid solutions, small modular reactors, gas-fired power, hydrogen gas turbine, power plans with integrated carbon capture, and digital solutions.
The global challenge is how to meet the energy needs of over 700m people without access to energy and gutting emissions from electricity and heat production which account for up to 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Businesses that will remain profitable as the energy transition deepens are those that find the critical balance between reducing emissions and providing sustainable energy. This calls for investments at scale for new renewable energy projects but these investments are few and far between at a time many countries are prioritising energy security.
Anis says gas can play a critical role in energy transition. Gas can support the further growth of renewables by providing flexible, on-demand, reliable power that has the lowest carbon emissions of traditional fossil fuel-based electricity and help stabilize the grid as variable sources of solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources are brought online.
“As the world steps up efforts to address the climate challenge, renewable energy and gas power
together, are positioned to play a leading role in accelerating the transition to a lower carbon energy
future,” says Anis. “The high-quality services GE offers at our Jebel Ali Service Center and Monitoring & Diagnostics Center, enable us to continue to collaborate with our customers to ensure that they can keep their gas power assets running reliably to support the energy transition in the years ahead.”
Renewable energy is expected to account for less than 50 percent of the total global electricity supply in 2040. Moreover, the challenge on hand is not as simple as solving for sustainability – we must address the energy trilemma to achieve more reliable, affordable, and sustainable power, while energy demand continues to rise, he said.
