Enercon India: Project Planning

Abstract

Prithwiraj Rathore had just finished his tea in the morning when his cellphone rang. As the team leader of erection and commissioning activities at the Nawapur site of Enercon, Prithwiraj was habituated to getting calls at odd hours. But, this telephone call seemed ominous. The villagers had been agitating for the better part of last week as they were under the impression that the wind turbine generators being constructed by the company near their agricultural land would affect the growth of their crops. While Prithwiraj had used all his reasoning powers to enlighten the villagers, he knew that what was driving the agitation was greed and not fear of stunted crop growth. He had seen such agitations under one pretext or another in almost every site he had managed in the last seven years at Enercon. Essentially, the villagers who held land close to the project site wanted to grab as much compensation as possible. In order to bring the situation under control, last night, Prithwiraj had requested the company for posting armed guards at the site. Vikrant Singh, Project Manager at the Vadodara project office, had indicated that such guards would be available within two days. Fortunately, it turned out that the phone call was not about reporting any trouble with the villagers. Instead, Jayant Shah, Site Engineer, was reporting a snag with the 220 tonne crane. To avoid high winds during erection of the wind turbine generator sections, the erection team usually worked either at dawn or late afternoon. While work was in progress at location W7 that morning, the crane stopped functioning because of a printed circuit board (PCB) blowout. Repairing such faults usually meant replacement of the PCB. Jayant reported that he had already informed the firm that supplied the crane. A similar PCB blowout had happened two weeks earlier and it had taken two days to replace the PCB. Within half an hour, Prithwiraj was on his way to the project site at Nawapur. Even though the morning traffic on the Porbandar-Dwarka highway was light, it would take him around one and a half hours to cover the 40-km stretch between Porbandar and Nawapur. Porbandar is a small town on the western coast of Gujarat that is reachable from Vadodara by overnight train. The remoteness of the Nawapur project site implied that any supply of spare part would take time. Nawapur was located in a region that had been identified as having significant wind energy.