NEW TURBINE REPAIR HUB ESTABLISHED IN SINGAPORE

our years ago, GE pledged $60 million to equip the Singaporean site for advanced gas turbine repairs. Today GE’s Repair Solutions Singapore (GRSS) is now a global hub for fixing the key components in the world’s fastest-growing fleet of H-Class heavy-duty gas turbines. Now the site is stepping up its technical expertise yet again. It has gained the capability to repair a crucial part of GE Gas Power’s mighty HA turbine, a symbol of Asia’s growth to gas-fueled power. That’s a potential game changer for Asian power generators, who have driven demand for the highly efficient HA in recent years, and it marks another step in GE’s broader ambition to make electricity more globally accessible.

No longer do customers have to send HA rotors, the fast-whirling shaft that sucks air into the turbine’s combustion section and spins the generator, to GE’s specialist shops in North America and Europe when they require attention. Doing the job in Singapore can cut as much as two months off the repair cycle. That wins back thousands of megawatt-hours of generation and millions of dollars in revenue for Asian customers, and significantly reduces the carbon emissions associated with a rotor repair job. “This is a very significant improvement to the lead time and delivery of repairs that supports the outage needs of our Asian customers,” says Morgan Terrill, an executive of supply chain development for GE who is based in San Sebastián, Spain.

With GRSS’s new capabilities, GE is homing in on self-sufficiency for repairs in far east Asia. Engineers in the region are now able to complete up to 90% of repair jobs for GE’s heavy-duty families without a single component or employee leaving or entering the continent. Not only that, the beefed-up GRSS will also flex its muscle on the global stage. Around 60% of the customers for the revamped site will hail from other regions of the world, excluding the U.S. That places GRSS alongside GE’s other global centers of excellence for heavy-duty gas turbines, namely those in Greenville, South Carolina, in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, and Belfort, France. Innovation, knowledge sharing, and standard setting are now a two-way street.

“Previously, we would have just developed all of the repairs in Greenville,” says Terrill. “It’s now cross-collaboration in action. Singapore is now contributing its own development ideas across to Greenville.”