How Knowledge Relay Revolutionizes Fossil Fuel Power Plant Operations for Increased Efficiency and Compliance

by Steven Mauss, CEO and President at Knowledge Relay, Inc.

In 2025, the United States is experiencing a significant surge in electricity demand.  Driven primarily by the rapid expansion of data centers, AI applications, and the broader electrification of transportation, this increased demand is placing considerable strain on the nation’s energy infrastructure.  In particular, fossil fuel power plants—including coal-fired, natural-gas fired, and petroleum fired—are pinched as they simultaneously face the opposing pressures to retire (due to environmental concerns and regulatory policies) and to deliver more energy.

I wanted to call out six specific industry problems facing fossil fuel power plants at this time (not an exhaustive list of issues, but six daunting challenges), then introduce some potential resolutions that plant operators may not (yet) have considered.

Six Key Industry Challenges

First, the Energy industry’s global rise in power demand.  With increased electrification, “the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts a 2% increase in electricity generation for 2025, with an additional 1% growth anticipated in 2026. This growth is largely attributed to higher electricity consumption from data centers and the electrification of heating and transportation sectors.”

But this increased demand is conflicted with a concurrent push for “greener” energy sources and commitments to retire fossil fuel electricity generation.  As a specific example, the EIA article continues, “Natural gas, currently the largest source of U.S. electricity, is expected to see its share decrease from 43% in 2024 to 40% in 2025, while coal’s share is projected to remain between 15% and 16% during this period.”  These contrasting goals leave fossil fuel power generation both struggling to meet higher demand and attempting to phase-out their operations.  A very difficult marketplace to navigate!

Second, these conflicting market pressures mean fossil fuel plants must maximize profitability under strict regulatory and safety mandates.  Environmental regulations significantly impact coal-fired and oil-fired power plants, impacting both strategy and tactics for their operations.  Three ready examples include:

• Coal and oil-fired power plants are regulated for air pollution via the Clean Air Act (regulating the emissions of pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and mercury), the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), and greenhouse gas regulations focused on carbon dioxide emissions, just to name a few.
• They are regulated for water pollution via the Clean Water Act (regulating wastewater discharges from power plants, including pollutants from coal ash, flue gas desulfurization, and other processes), effluent limitation guidelines (ELGs) for wastewater discharges, and regulation of coal ash ponds to prevent ground water contamination.
• And they are regulated for waste and land pollution via the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) as well as other laws.

Across all of these environments, regulations are generally becoming stricter—driven by concerns about public health, climate change, and a growing focus on addressing the impact of pollution on communities located near power plants.  Yet power plants must still generate power and attempt to maximize profitability in the face of these strict regulations.  Again, a very difficult marketplace to navigate!

Third, shutdown, turnaround, outage (STOs) operations for fossil fuel power plants are exceptionally complex.  Off the cuff, some real-world examples might include:

• These plants require elaborate systems with many interconnected components (boilers, turbines, piping, etc.), where this complexity increases the number of tasks, dependencies, and potential points of failure during an STO.
• Further, older plants common in the coal industry often have unique, outdated or custom-built equipment which make sourcing parts and expertise challenging.
• STOs involve working with high-pressure systems, extreme temperatures, and hazardous materials—all of which pose significant safety risks.
• Finally, managing the vast amount of data generated during an STO—including inspection reports, work orders, and safety records—is critical to safety, productivity, and compliance.

The elaborate data management required for decision-making and post-STO analysis is daunting for all fossil fuel plants.  Any downtime translates to lost revenue, adding pressure to complete STOs as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Despite this need, cost overruns are common and require careful budget management and contingency planning.

Fourth, fossil fuel plants often run data silos and outdated systems.  While data silos reduce productivity and efficiency—and limit business visibility, impacting decision-making—for many businesses, such silos compromise data security and governance for fossil fuel plants . . . impacting their financial, regulatory, and even safety compliance.

At the same time, the industry’s reliance on Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM—while not necessarily an outdated system—brings the limitations of that software to operators.  For example:

• As highlighted even in Oracle’s own documentation, the P6 EPPM adapter has limitations in data synchronization, as it doesn’t fully support the synchronization of spread values in project schedules.  This can create challenges when trying to integrate P6 data with other systems that rely on detailed time-phased data.
• Integrating P6 with newer, cloud-based applications or big data platforms can be painful due to P6’s more traditional architecture.  This offset can hinder real-time data flow and analysis.
• There are data limits placed on many aspects of the system, such as maximum levels of hierarchies and maximum numbers of codes and baselines.  These limits stymie power plants’ ability to manage very large projects (or very large portfolios of projects).
• And today’s data demands strong data visualization, such that while P6 has reporting, many users find its visualization capabilities less flexible than dedicated business intelligence tools.

But beyond these P6 limitations, integrating data from diverse sources in power plants presents challenges when legacy or proprietary systems are not easily compatible with modern digital technologies.  Outdated systems limit data integration with inconsistent data entry practices, missing values, and mixed data granularity that lead to inaccurate or unreliable insights.  As a result,  regulatory compliance issues grow as data integration must support reporting and auditing requirements that are difficult to deliver with outdated software and systems.

This argument leads to the fifth problem:  The lingering reliance on manual data processes at fossil fuel power plants.  Such manual processes—born of legacy or proprietary systems and process that do not readily integrate—inevitably produce inefficiencies, errors, and waste.

For example, human error in keying data, variations in data collection, and variations in entry methods generate inconsistent data quality and delay reporting—both of which can cause missed opportunities to optimize plant operations or prevent costly equipment failures.  The increased labor costs of manual data management contribute to inefficient, ineffective, and more expensive operations.

Finally, Knowledge Relay has seen a sixth problem:  An industry skills gap—exacerbated by an aging workforce, retirements, and fewer engineering degrees awarded to replace departing workers.  I have elaborated on this growing problem in two previous Knowledge Relay blogs—the skills deficit and how operators can overcome labor shortages—where a brain drain and insufficient educational pipelines are beginning to hinder the Energy industry’s growth.  For both fossil fuel power plants, and clean energy solutions such as nuclear power, this skills gap makes meeting the increased power demands of the U.S. market much more difficult.

One Potential Solution

I not only have suggestions to help fossil fuel plants overcome these critical challenges but have—in fact—spent the past 40 years building a solution-as-a-service that uniquely tackles these diverse issues.

Knowledge Relay’s one solution for accurate, complete data to the right people at the right time addresses all of these data challenges for fossil fuel plants in 2025.  How?

Knowledge Relay delivers data migration, automation, and metrics with proven industry best practices.  For fossil fuel power plants, Knowledge Relay brings deep experience in uniting data from P6, asset management systems, and financial systems to produce comprehensive reports, advanced dashboards, and even what-if analysis.

With advanced analytics and reporting — whether your fossil fuel plant needs to create an entire reporting system, or just supplement the one(s) you already have, Knowledge Relay’s custom report and dashboard development can help you meet regulatory and custom business requirements.  For example, AEP wanted one dashboard with all of their workplace services or outages SPIs together—and also needed to resolve correlation errors to fix their Earned Value reporting.  Knowledge Relay came to their rescue with custom reporting and our Earned Value for the Enterprise solution (EVE) to track project performance, identify variances, and forecast project outcomes.  You can read more about our efforts for AEP here.

With project and portfolio management — Knowledge Relay enhances project planning, execution, and monitoring with our KR Reports, KR Dashboards, and KR Data Scheduler.  For fossil fuel power plants, Knowledge Relay can streamline shutdown, turnaround, and outage (STO) project execution—minimizing downtime and maximizing operational efficiency.

With our knowledge management and collaboration — helping facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams, again with our KR Reports, KR Dashboards, and KR Data Scheduler, we support First Energy with resource burn-down curves (multi-project), activity burn-down curves (multi-project), daily performance summaries (resource and activity with tabs), plus Total Float Trend.  For First Energy or any fossil fuel plant where SAP manages actual costs and P6 manages the schedules, Knowledge Relay can align data reports for comparison, budget analysis, and even resources to merge SAP and P6 data.

With our solution-as-a-service technologies and services where Knowledge Relay mitigates the industry skills gap — providing critical data migration, ETL, reporting, analytics, what-if forecasting for in-house teams leveraging over 40 years of industry best practices.

Most importantly, Knowledge Relay’s solution-as-a-service can deliver immediate benefits for fossil fuel power plants:

• Measurably increasing operational efficiency by improving plant uptime and productivity, plus reducing maintenance costs and project delays during STO.
• Enhancing accuracy, compliance and safety with real-time data and analytics that support regulatory compliance, plus dashboards and alerts to prevent small issues from becoming compliance or safety nightmares.
• Improving profitability through optimized operations—and reduced costs—that directly contribute to higher productivity (top line) and higher profitability (bottom line).
• Reducing risk with the comprehensive, accurate, and timely data insights required to minimize unplanned outages.
• And empowering your workforce with better knowledge-sharing and access to data to streamline critical workflows and elevate visibility and decision-making.

You have enough to deal with!