Control Room Operator

About NovaSource

NovaSource Power Services is the service partner for renewables asset owners ready to fuel smart growth. As an O&M-focused company with 20 years of operating experience, NovaSource has the global reach and strategic capabilities to achieve our clients’ renewables goals around the world.

To serve our clients, we invest into our people. On hire, we assess each employee’s experience and expertise, then mentor them to grow engaging and satisfying careers.

Our turn-key services optimize each step of our clients’ project lifecycles — from commissioning to decommissioning and everything in between. Our approach delivers creates success for our clients, stability for our teams, and enables us to build a world-class culture of excellence. And that’s how we empower a renewable world.

Basic Job Functions:

The Control Room Operator will play a key role in assisting the Operations Supervisor by pursuing maximum possible revenue deliveries, identifying, and initiating appropriate response plans for alarm conditions that may place safety or production at risk, and implementing all applicable regulatory and contractual obligations as they apply to real-time operations fleet wide. The Control Room Operator will be responsible for coordinating day-to-day operations activities for a diverse portfolio of generating facilities under the jurisdiction of many balancing authorities, transmission providers, and scheduling entities.

• Monitors and operates many large and small aggregate generators, familiar with use of multiple monitoring and control platforms.
• Evaluate complicated operating situations against multiple regulatory and contractual obligations: operating contracts (O&M Agreement, Power Purchase Agreement, Interconnect Agreement), Balancing Authority tariffs, business practice manuals, transmission and scheduling entity operating handbooks, O&M operating agreements, and any NERC standards applicable to the generator operator / generator owner.
• For equipment under O&M jurisdiction, during equipment changes, safeguards the Generator Owner by enforcing OM change management policies, protecting Generator Owner compliance.
• For equipment not yet under O&M jurisdiction, provides monitoring to recognize any high priority alarm conditions that may place company at risk under applicable operating contracts and regulations. Provides recommendations to Commissioning for the purpose of mitigating risk, which recommendations from time to time may involve complicated business trade-offs.
• Operate multiple power plant control systems technologies across the fleet, understanding the behavior and capabilities of each technology; predict grid response to any control action; implement voltage schedules according to operating agreements and contracts.
• Initiate and document an appropriate alarm response plan for all trouble indications in accordance with procedure, including documenting low-impact and low-risk trouble indications in CMMS system for planned response; coordinating immediate response for high risk or high impact trouble indications, providing all notifications required by contracts and regulations to the Owner, Transmission Provider, and Scheduling Entity.
• Perform failure analysis using historical data for inverter trips and performance reductions, failures of MV and HV equipment, network equipment, and control systems. Assigns outage classifications to ensure all monthly reporting obligations are met and provide reliability data for NovaSource use in future process development and site development.
• Maximize the fleet’s overall value through interactions with maintenance teams across the fleet; understand contractual dispatch obligations for each resource; understand the energy impact of all outages in the context of effective availability and performance requirements; always challenge the maintenance team to maximize the owner’s revenue and bonus; maximize value when accomplishing required maintenance.
• During a failure of the forecasting system, use a pre-written worksheet and OM procedures to manually generate and deliver all forecasts.
• Maintains the operator log for tracking: capacity offline to ensure accurate up-to-date forecasting; trouble conditions and status for purposes of turnover and customer reporting; change in status of any contract or services; control actions implemented at the site or by Control Room; interactions with external regulatory entities.
• Provides contractually required failure notifications using the operator log.
• For Balancing Authorities that run Capacity Markets, reports capacity in real-time as required by the Market Tariff and Power Purchase Agreement. For Balancing Authorities that run Energy Markets, reports significant outages, and ensures the forecasting system will capture any outage’s impact for subsequent hours by logging shortfalls.
• Provide safety review for any Procedure written to a specific Task by the maintenance team, to ensure that for any Medium Voltage or High Voltage switching operations: minimum isolation requirements are met according to O&M policies and OSHA/NFPA/NETA requirements, and switching instructions are consistent with Good Utility Practice.

Experience:

• 6 years’ experience in power plant operations with high voltage experience.
• Able to demonstrate competent technical knowledge of general plant and system processes, electrical and SCADA systems.
• Able to demonstrate competent technical knowledge in analyzing equipment performance and identifying performance issues using software tools.

Required Skills:

Behavioral

• Ability to coordinate multiple activities and ensure safety, quality, and schedule adherence.
• Ability to take direction, identify problems, develop solutions, conduct analysis independently and in collaboration with others.
• Ability to work in a high-stress environment where decisions directly impact personnel safety and equipment reliability.

Technical

• Proficient computer skills using MS Excel, MS Project, MS Word, and Outlook
• Experience working with and troubleshooting plant SCADA systems and computerized maintenance management systems. (Maximo)
• Knowledge of Power System Dynamics required for predicting grid impact during control actions.
• Understanding of electronic power system protection equipment purpose/behavior is required.
• VBA and/or SQL Experience is a plus.

Education:

• Degree with an emphasis in power systems or formal operations apprenticeship training or equivalent.
• Experience may be considered if relevant.

Office Physical Requirements:

All positions in our office require interaction with people and technology while either standing or sitting. In order to best service our customers, internal and external, all associates must be able to communicate face- to-face and on the phone with or without reasonable accommodation. NovaSource is committed to compliance with its obligations under all applicable state and federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. In keeping with this commitment, it attempts to reasonably accommodate applicants and employees in accordance with the requirements of the disability discrimination laws. It also invites individuals with disabilities to participate in a good faith, interactive process to identify reasonable accommodations that can be made without imposing an undue hardship.

US: Diversity Statement – Equal Employment Opportunity

It is NovaSource’s policy to provide equal employment opportunity to all applicants and employees. NovaSource disapproves of, and will not tolerate, unlawful discrimination against any applicant or employee because of race, color, national origin or ancestry, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity, age, religion, disability, family care status, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws.