Digital Logbooks Enable Calpine to Centrally Monitor 12 Remote Sites

Calpine Corporation is America’s largest generator of electricity from natural gas and geothermal resources. It specializes in developing, constructing, owning and operating natural gas-fired and renewable geothermal power plants that use advanced technologies to generate power in a low-carbon and environmentally responsible manner.

Calpine’s objective was to implement a web-based electronic logbook application for recording plant status, shift activities, open issues and to facilitate shift handovers. The digital logbook and data needed to be readily accessible to all Calpine’s plant users in a common format. The company wanted information to be accessible across its different facilities and, at the same time, be visible at a corporate level.

What was the challenge? Finding a central digital solution that could accommodate a high user load with information feeding from different facilities across North America. In addition, it needed flexibility to record data from plants with different fuel-types. j5 Operations Management Solutions met those needs with the j5 Operations Logbook, j5 Shift Handover and j5 Standing Orders applications now all in operation.

This central installation is flexible enough to accommodate Calpine’s diverse facilities. It has established a secure environment to manage operations management procedures and ultimately reduced corporate risk. Data is easily visible at a corporate level for trending and analysis, with the solutions drastically improving the flow of information while streamlining management reporting.

“It has become an essential tool. Logbook entries from twelve remote sites can now be easily reviewed first thing each morning via the Emailed Daily Log Report. Old school operators were initially skeptical but quickly learned how to use the program. The program is used by 100% of the employees, many of whom had no computer skills prior to Calpine. Previous paper logbook entries were lacking and management oversight of the log entries was used mainly when there was an incident.” –Calpine Plant Manager

Read the entire case study to learn how Calpine successfully implemented j5 Operations Management Solutions to its advantage.