Colorado Melons

I remember reading in a relatively recent issue of Coal Power Magazine that Powder River Basin (PRB) coal now accounts for about 40% of all the coal fired in the U.S. to produce electricity. Although lower in cost per Btu, PRB is unlike any other coal in that its easily crumbled, dusty nature requires special attention to its safe handling and storage; which can only be the result of thoughtful and deliberate attention paid to the details of operation.

Keeping in touch with some of my old firefighter brothers and now actively involved in the Power Generation Industry, we are learning – unfortunately through passed major industrial explosions involving the accumulation of combustible powder – that accidents have mainly occurred when operators underestimate, or dismiss entirely, the devastating potential of combustible particulate solids.

A mechanical failure within the conveyor system can cause enough heat buildup to start a coal fire. Inadequate lubrication in the bearing of a roller or the friction between a seized roller and the conveyor belt can buildup heat sufficient to ignite a coal laiden belt.

Although many such incipient fires may not have been as widely advertised as Russia’s recent Sayano-Shushenskaya hydro-electric castastrophy, they have occurred. (John Cowdrey will also point out that even this devistating catastrophy hasn’t hit the main-stream U.S. media.) Plant Operators throughout our industry speculate that the frequency of incidents may be rising with small contained fires occurring regularly at many plants. Continue Reading »

The pictures in this post are of the Manitou Hydro here in Colorado, one of the plants I’m now responsible for operating & maintaining. Producing electricity since Feb 15, 1905, this setup has been in-service for over 100 years and as our friend Bill McKeon of the Gazette wrote, “The Manitou Hydroelectric Plant is proof that a good idea can stand the test of time.” ¹

Although the driving technology is not new, improvements have continually been made in this area of our industry with control systems, generators, and turbines to increase efficiency, reliability and output.

The most common of these newer turbines is the Pelton wheel, which is basically a series of cups attached to a hub (under the baby blue cover in the pictures of Manitou Unit #2). A jet of water is aimed at the cups and the resulting force on the cups causes the turbine to spin. Electricity is subsequently created by the relative motion between magents and conductive windings inside the gray & red generator.

Other types of turbines include the Turgo, Crossflow and various axial flow turbines, where the shaft through the center of the turbine runs in the same direction as the water flow, much like a boat propeller.

The first hydroelectric power plant was built in 1882 in Appleton, Wisconsin to provide 12.5 kilowatts to light two paper mills and a home. Today’s hydropower plants generally range in size from several hundred kilowatts to several hundred megawatts, but a few mammoth plants have capacities up to 10,000 megawatts and supply electricity to millions of people.

Worldwide, hydropower plants have acombined capacity of 675,000 megawatts and annually produce over 2.3 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity. Our nation’s largest hydropower plant is the 7,600 megawatt Grand Coulee power station on the Columbia River in Washington State. The plant is being upscaled to 10,080 megawatts, which will place it second in the world behind a colossal 13,320 megawatt plant in Brazil.

Hydropower supplies 9 percent of the country’s electricity, accounts for 49 percent of all renewable energy used in the US. And after cutting my teeth in this industry with a couple of good people in a coal-fired plant, I am excited to be working on the forefront of renewables.

Change is good ;)