Voith hosts multi-day hydro training workshop that featured NHA’s Malcolm Woolf as keynote speaker

Woolf spoke at the Voith-sponsored workshop, which took place over three days in York, Pennsylvania, the location of Voith Hydro North America’s headquarters. It featured numerous training sessions led by Voith Hydro and Voith Digital Ventures experts. More than 70 attendees joined Voith’s team for the event, and those visitors were also invited to tour Voith’s manufacturing facility and hydraulic test lab in West Manchester Township. A site tour of Muddy Run Pumped Storage Facility in nearby Drumore Township, Pennsylvania, was also part of the workshop. The Muddy Run tour came about through the generosity of Exelon, which made their site available as an added benefit to workshop attendees.

“As a training event, our goal was to educate hydropower owners and operators on the most up-to-date technology available to them,” said Inna Kremza, Principal Engineer, Customer Training Manager, Voith Hydro North America, who also organized the workshop. “Through numerous case studies and trend reports, we used the workshop to share the experiences and findings we’ve collected with the support of our customers.”

Sessions included generator design, maintenance, modernization and rehabilitation; turbine design, rehabilitation and modernization; digital solutions for hydropower; controls and network segmentation; safety by design; governor, exciter and protection for hydro plants; and case studies through Voith’s HyService and field work case studies. Through the workshop, networking opportunities were abundant, allowing attendees to interact with one another as well as Voith’s experts. Also available at the workshop was an augmented reality (AR) demonstration which showed how hydropower operators can use latest technology to assist with maintenance and regular operations.

“This was intentionally a broad experience for our visitors,” said Voith’s Carl Atkinson, Director of Business Development. “We wanted them to walk away with a vision for their facility and how its performance and reliability could improve if it were equipped with the latest digitalization and automation. Voith’s goal is to help these facility owners and operators reach their production goals, and the modernization techniques and processes we talked about at the workshop can help them do it.”

“The tours helped set the workshop apart from other training sessions,” sad Atkinson. “Getting people out of a classroom setting was a goal. Our visitors got to see real-life projects underway in our shop and the technology used at Muddy Run, and that helped make this workshop a success.”

Stanley Kocon, President & CEO of Voith Hydro North America, also noted the success of the workshop and how pleased the team was to welcome Malcolm Woolf to the event.

“Hydropower is a critical and strategic element of the North American electricity infrastructure, and efforts to improve its capabilities only make it that much more valuable. That’s our goal at Voith – to drive hydropower in the United States to the next level – and events like the Voith Hydro Workshop do just that,” Kocon said.