Twenty-five years of getting systems to work the first time
Paul Turner, P.Eng, PMP, founded Turner Capital Projects and the Institute of Commissioning and Assurance to answer a question most capital projects leave until too late: will this asset start up and perform when everyone is counting on it?
Why TCP exists
Paul's career began in aerospace, on satellites and launch systems for the Canadian Space Agency and payloads for the International Space Station. There, outcomes are non-negotiable: systems must work exactly as intended, the first time, under real operating conditions. Quality is designed, governed and verified, not inspected in after the fact.
Moving into power, on hydroelectric generation and a $5.2 billion HVDC transmission megaproject, he saw outcomes treated very differently. Far more capital was at stake, yet projects leaned on fragmented accountability, late-stage testing and the assumption that problems could be fixed later. The water sector showed the same pattern.
Where TCP works today
Delivery frameworks such as PMI govern scope, schedule and budget well. They were never designed to show whether a project will actually perform. That gap lands hardest on the people who fund and insure these assets: lenders, their advisers and insurers carry start-up risk with very little evidence about it.
TCP brings that evidence. We assess readiness at any stage of a project, most often around financial close, and give lenders, insurers and owners an independent view of where start-up delay is likely to come from and what would close it.
How the pieces fit
- ICxA sets the outcome assurance standard as an independent non-profit
- TCP applies it on live projects and deals, under licence
- Training builds the capability to deliver readiness inside project teams
What we believe
Mission
Start with the end in mind. Define what success looks like at the beginning, then govern and verify the project against it all the way to operation.
Vision
Capital projects that meet their cost, schedule and performance objectives far more often than the one-in-ten that do today.
Values
People deliver projects. Put the right skills and the right tools in the hands of the right people, and teams achieve great things together.
Beliefs
Electrification, energy security and growing demand all depend on infrastructure that works. Nine late or over-budget projects in ten is not good enough.
Project experience
$5.2B, 2,300 MW, 1,400 km
- Two HVDC converter stations, DC switchyards and electrode sites
- Two 230 kV AC switchyards
- Four 230 kV synchronous condensers
200 MW run-of-river station
- Three 70 MW turbine-generators in northern Canada
- Unit control and monitoring system
- Balance-of-plant testing and commissioning, 230 kV GIS
Pollution control centre
- Process upgrade to new environmental standards
- Expansion for larger flow volumes
- Replacement of obsolete distributed control networks
Spacecraft & propulsion
- SmallSAT communication and data handling unit verification
- ISS payload performance verification
- Booster motor qualification and production-line verification
3,000 MW, 732-mile HVDC and AC link
- Integration management across detailed studies and design
- Two HVDC converter terminals, Wyoming to Utah
- 1,500 MW AC extension into southern Nevada
1,385 MW generating station
- Front-end planning for a major station on the lower Nelson River
- Project definition for northern Canadian construction
Transmission construction and maintenance
- Project management for provincial transmission construction
- Line maintenance programs for a Crown utility
2 kW power control unit
- Technical lead, design and build of space-qualified electronics
- Fault-protected power distribution to bus and payload
- Rad-tolerant parts selection, derating and FMECA
Science satellite, launch to orbit
- Command and data handling subsystem functional testing
- Automated spacecraft checkout systems
- Launch and early-orbit commissioning at the national space agency's operations centre
Let's talk about your project
If you fund, insure or own a project where start-up can't be left to chance, we'd like to hear about it.