Cyber security and talent shortage top concerns: Invensys' Paul Dacruz

A worldwide boom in new power plant construction is putting a strain on engineering resources, says Invensys VP Paul Dacruz. And worldwide some 30 % of power plants are more than thirty years old which means that many of them are now at half life and facing obsolecense in parts.

All this means that there is a talent crunch on for engineers and plant operators need to plan well for new plants to minimize downtime. One way they can do this and speed up projects is by doing operations simulation in the factory rather than in the field. Invensys recently pioneered this process and it paid big dividends on a project in India when it was discovered in factory simulation that there was a problem with a supplied boiler. " If we discovered this once we were on site it would have delayed the project at east another three months," said Dacruz. As the central nervous system of a power plant , Invensys ensures all of the parts of a power plant work together. At a power industry roundtable in Singapore held at PowerGen Asia, some power executives expressed concern at using DCS systems supplied by turnkey contractors that were fast becoming obsolete. The problem with these smaller systems is that there is no path for upgrade and they can quickly get obsolete.One power executive from Singapore told the audience that their concern was that even if the starting price was more attractive, service, support and upgrades left them at the mercy of contractors or smaller firms who may not be around in a few years when new oarts or repairs were really needed.

Another concern of the audience was cyber security, which was on the agenda following the first ever cyber attack on a nucelar plant in Iran. In that instance the virus was fed into the control system by memory stick. In Singapore regulators have asked all plant operatorsto review their cyber security but there is still no one clear path to security. One delegate Lao expressed concern at exuding the link fromthe DCS to corporate clients and sdked whether a firewall was enough.

Dacruz told delegates that Invensys had already released version 8.5 of the software which disabled USB ports.