The commissioning playbook
One test sequence for every site, written with the technicians who use it.
14 weeks down to
8.7 weeks
Size
4 sites, 640 MWh in total
Location
Netherlands and United Kingdom
My role
Lead engineer and author
Team
6 engineers, 14 technicians
Duration
26 months, 2021 to 2023
01
The situation
When I joined Voltaic North, each site was commissioned from its own spreadsheet. The first site I ran took 14 weeks from first power to handover. A lot of that time went on tests done in the wrong order, tests repeated because the record was unclear, and waiting for someone to decide what counted as a pass.
The technicians knew where the time went, but they were rarely asked. Vendors arrived with their own procedures, and the three sets of paperwork did not agree with each other. With three more sites already contracted, I could see we would spend the same 14 weeks three more times unless the method itself changed.
02
What I did
I wrote one test sequence that every site would follow, from factory acceptance to the final handover signature. I wrote it with the technicians, on site, during the second project. Each step has one owner, one pass criterion and one place to record the result. If a step could not be explained in two lines, we split it.
We moved every test that did not need grid power to before energisation. That included cable checks, protection settings and the communication tests between the batteries and the control system. I also added a 15 minute review each afternoon where the next day’s steps were read aloud. It sounds small. It removed most of our repeated tests.
03
What changed
Commissioning time fell on every site after the first. The fourth site took 8.7 weeks, down from 14, which is 38 percent shorter. Nothing was cut from the scope. The same tests were done, in a better order, by people who knew the pass criteria before they started.
The playbook is 64 pages long and is still the company standard. New technicians are trained on it in their first week. The part I am most pleased with is the change log at the back. It has 41 entries, and more than half of them were proposed by technicians and not by engineers.
8.7 weeks
Commissioning time on the fourth site
Down from 14 weeks on the first
38%
Shorter commissioning
14 weeks to 8.7, over 4 sites
640 MWh
Storage commissioned at Voltaic North
4 sites, 2021 to 2023
“It is the first procedure I have used that was written by someone who had stood next to us while we did the work.”
Hanneke Visser
Senior Commissioning Technician, Voltaic North