Xcel Energy’s Senior Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Tim O’Connor rolled out a strategic vision and business strategy for their nuclear plants: Monticello and Prairie Island. The vision centers on ensuring nuclear as a part of Xcel Energy’s generation portfolio in the long term by becoming industry leaders in strategic business areas, reducing overall costs and maximizing output from our facilities.

O’Connor sees a clear path to ensuring nuclear as part of the Xcel Energy generation portfolio for the long-term. But to maintain nuclear as an attractive business option for the company beyond the current operating licenses, the fleet must perform well today. Key to that strategy is ensuring our units’ performance reach 95 percent capacity, achieve 30-day/$30 million outages and be competitive on a dollars-per-megawatt basis with other options like natural gas generation.

The centerpiece of Xcel Energy Nuclear Fleet’s business strategy is One Fleet Focus, which includes an annual look at the fleet’s largest performance gaps and makes plans to close them. It hinges on taking action as a single fleet unit, rather than individual sites. Six focus areas were identified and captured in the 2015 Fleet Xcellence Plan. The plan includes several actions that will be taken in 2015 to close each gap. A scorecard, which includes both the department’s incentive goals and focus area milestones will track progress against the plan and maintain fleet awareness. Each year, the fleet will take a fresh look at its largest performance gaps and will create an updated plan.

The 2015 Focus Areas and High Level Actions include:

· Corrective Action Program and Behaviors

· Engineering

· Refueling Outages

· Regulatory Performance

· Work Management

· Workforce Planning/Development

In addition to completing the actions to close gaps in each focus area, Xcel Energy will track performance against the best nuclear fleets in the country. Nuclear leadership expects us in the future to be known throughout the industry for exemplifying teamwork, regulatory proficiency or savvy, a robust technical conscience/expertise, and superior craftsmanship.