Western Area Power Administration Would Benefit From Improvements to Its Management of Critical Spare Parts
September 27, 2024
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September 24, 2024
Western Area Power Administration Would Benefit From Improvements to Its Management of Critical Spare Parts
As one of the Department of Energy’s Power Marketing Administrations, Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) supports the Department’s priority for a resilient, reliable, and secure North American electricity system. WAPA has identified three classes of critical assets that would be most disruptive if they failed: 1) transmission lines; 2) circuit breakers; and 3) transformers. In response to our draft report, WAPA officials stated they define critical spares at the asset level, not at the subcomponent level. WAPA officials added that they use in-service spare transformers operating in parallel that add redundancy to the system in case of failure or scheduled or unscheduled maintenance of one of the units.
A critical spare can be defined as an asset or part needed to return critical assets to service following normal and reasonably anticipated wear and tear, as well as credible failures that would not normally be predicted via monitoring and trending programs, with sufficient advance warning to allow for procurement activities and reasonable lead times for needed replacement. We initiated this audit to determine whether WAPA adequately managed its critical spare parts inventory.
We found that WAPA lacked a comprehensive critical spare parts program to adequately manage its spare parts inventory. Specifically, we found that while WAPA has a program for maintaining its critical assets, it was unable to demonstrate that it had specified the critical parts needed for each critical asset, identified the critical spare parts in inventory, established sparing levels and reorder points for critical spare parts, or staged the critical spare parts at strategic locations.
The issues we identified occurred, in part, because WAPA officials believed their current programs and collective expertise were adequate to ensure the reliability of critical assets.
The attached report contains two recommendations that, if fully implemented, would help ensure that critical spare parts, including consumables, are available when needed to reduce the risk of long-term outages. Management fully concurred with the recommendations and provided corrective actions that are responsive to our recommendations.