Why summer is the season for industrial coatings and mechanical services — and why the way you fund and time this work matters more than it used to. Capacity repriced, turbines hit six-year lead times, and the asset you already own got a lot more valuable. The old maintenance calendar was built for a market that no longer exists.
For a long time, the standard maintenance calendar was the right one. Protect the outage budget, run the bulk repair work in spring and fall, and defer the coatings and structural projects that don’t feel urgent. When capacity was cheap and a replacement turbine was a phone call away, that was a perfectly rational way to run a plant — and the operators who ran it that way weren’t wrong.
That market is gone. Capacity prices are climbing, reserve margins are tightening, and turbine lead times have stretched to roughly six years — which means the fleet you operate today is, functionally, the fleet you’ll run for the next decade. Every year of service life preserved on an existing asset is worth dramatically more than it was three years ago. And the single most expensive event on a tight summer grid — a forced outage during peak — is exactly what deferred maintenance quietly makes more likely.
“The maintenance calendar most plants still run was built for cheap capacity
and easy replacements. Both of those assumptions just expired.”
None of this is a knock on how plants have been run. It’s a change in the underlying math — and the operators who see it first have a real edge. Two kinds of work decide how well a plant rides out that change: industrial coatings, which protect the assets you can’t easily replace, and mechanical services, which keep you covered both on the projects you can plan and the outages you can’t. Both are, conveniently, best suited to summer. Visit our Coatings and Mechanical page or Contact Us for more detailed information on the solutions Groome has to offer.
| CAPACITY PRICES ▲ climbing |
RESERVE MARGINS ▼ tightening |
TURBINE LEAD TIMES ▲ ~6 years |
SO THE ASSET YOU HAVE is the one you’re keeping |
Three forces, one conclusion: the value of keeping an existing unit healthy has gone up — and the cost of letting it slide has gone up faster.
Two opportunities the old calendar misses
The first is summer-eligible work that quietly protects the asset. Coatings and structural work don’t need a unit offline. They protect the exterior and structural assets that corrode in place while the hot path keeps running, and summer is the best time to do them: application temperatures in range, faster curing, better pricing and crew availability. The reason this work slips is understandable — it never feels urgent. Corrosion is patient. It doesn’t trip a unit; it just quietly converts a coating problem into a steel-replacement problem on a timeline nobody chose.
The second is the forced outage — which is an opportunity disguised as an emergency. Units come down in summer: maintenance outages when an issue forces a short ISO-approved stop, forced outages when something trips unplanned. When it happens, the unit is losing money by the hour and the clock is the enemy. The plants that come out of it best are the ones that already decided who they call — before the trip, not during the scramble of finding a contractor and waiting on mobilization.
“The cost of a forced outage is decided before it happens —
by whether you already have a crew that can roll the day you call.”
Both come back to the same reframe: in this market, maintenance isn’t a cost to minimize — it’s how you protect an asset that’s now very hard to replace. Hold that view, and the summer calendar reorganizes itself.
Stop waiting on the wrong work
The fix isn’t maintaining more. It’s getting the season right. Coatings and structural projects run while units stay online — do them now. Heavy unit repair genuinely does need an outage — stop trying to force it into summer, and stop letting it crowd out the work that doesn’t. The split is not subtle:
| DO IT NOW — WHILE UNITS RUN No outage required. Summer is the ideal window. |
STOP FORCING INTO SUMMER Plan it for the spring / fall outage. |
| Coatings — exterior & structural assets Structural one-offs — platforms, landings, walkways, prefab, building repairs First-call readiness for the unexpected outage |
Expansion joint Bolted joints Ductwork BOP equipment repair |
Everything in the left column is either preservation you control or readiness you arrange in advance. None of it requires permission from the grid.
Coatings: protecting the asset you can’t easily replace
A correctly specified coating system delivers 15 to 25 years of protection against the corrosion and section loss that otherwise force a major capital steel replacement — the kind of project that lands on a capital plan years before anyone wanted it there. That’s the real value of coatings: not housekeeping, but the difference between managing an asset’s life on your schedule and reacting to its decline on the asset’s. In a market where the unit you run today is the unit you’ll run for the next decade, protecting its structural integrity is protecting the thing that earns.
The only real constraint is climate, and it’s a scheduling question rather than a barrier: much of the country sits in prime application conditions through summer, while the hottest, most humid regions are simply timed to the right windows. Fully mobile crews mean the work travels to the site and schedules around local conditions — the constraint is the calendar, not the geography.
Mechanical: the move most plants leave on the table
Heavy unit repair waits for an outage — that part isn’t controversial. The opportunity is in what you do with the rest of summer. Two plays, and the second is the one most plants overlook:
| THE OBVIOUS ONE Structural one-offs |
THE ONE THAT WINS First-call readiness |
| Platforms, landings, walkways, prefab, building repairs — plannable work that never touches the running unit. | Arrange the mobile, self-performed crew now, so when a unit trips you skip the scramble and get back online first. |
Both sit within our mechanical division — the same self-performed crews and ASME R-Stamp capability that handle pressure-boundary repair in an outage also build the structural scope and run the fast-response work in summer.
The readiness play costs nothing to set up and changes everything about how a summer outage plays out. A forced outage is going to find every plant eventually. The only variable you control is whether the crew that fixes it is already yours — mobile, self-performed, no subcontractor lag — or whether you’re making cold calls while the meter runs. The plants that decide in advance are the ones that turn an emergency into a quick fix.
The budget trap – and the way out
There’s a structural reason this work gets deferred, and it has nothing to do with whether it’s worth doing. It falls into a gap between two budgets. Most plant operating budgets are sized for routine, recurring maintenance — and a coating program or a structural project is lumpy, periodic, and capital-intrinsic, so it strains the operating line. But it also tends to be too small, project by project, to compete for a spot on the capital plan against a turbine or a transformer. Too big for opex, too small for capex. So it waits.
| OPERATING BUDGET Sized for routine, recurring upkeep. Lumpy coating & structural work strains it. |
▼ FALLS IN THE GAP ▼ Too big for opex, too small per project for capex — so it gets deferred. |
CAPITAL BUDGET Reserved for major assets. Individual projects look too small to compete. |
|
THE WAY OUT: document it as capital improvement |
||
The reframe is the unlock. Work that extends the documented service life of a capital asset may not be routine maintenance at all — it can be an investment in the asset, and may be fundable that way with the right engineering and documentation behind it. That’s a conversation worth having with your finance team before the next budget cycle, not after.
Whether specific work qualifies for capital treatment depends on your accounting policies, the facts of the project, and applicable standards and jurisdiction. The above is general information, not tax or accounting advice — confirm the treatment with your own finance and tax advisors.
The window is open now
Groome does this work — industrial coatings, mechanical services, and fast-response outage support for U.S. power generation. Crews are fully mobile, AMPP QP1 and ASME R-Stamp credentialed, and able to produce the engineering and documentation that supports capital treatment. But the point of this piece isn’t who does the work. It’s that the math underneath plant maintenance has changed, and the calendar built for the old math leaves real value on the table. Maintain in the right season. Fund the work the right way. Decide who you call before the unit comes down. Protect the asset that’s now far harder to replace. Visit our Coatings and Mechanical page for more information.
“Summer isn’t the season to squeeze this work in.
It’s the season the smart operators build around.”
and start the conversation.
