"Dry Fork Station started as a concept. Now, with construction more than 90-percent complete, the plant is moving into commissioning and start-up. That means Basin Electric is taking over certain areas of the plant, getting ready for the plant to start up. About 60 Basin Electric employees are working on site, with about 20 of them working right here, in the admin building."
The front desk in the lobby has a friendly face... and the training rooms and lunch rooms are fully functional.
Although Dry Fork Station looks and feels close to complete, operations superintendent Joel Dingman is focused on a big job -- commissioning.
(Joel Dingman): "It takes a lot of coordination to ensure that not only is the mechanical piece ready, but the electrical side is ready in a timely fashion."
During the commissioning phase, a blue ribbon or tag means this section of the plant is now under Basin Electric control. It's no longer part of construction and controlled by the contractor who built it.
(Joel Dingman): "That's how we signify to the contractors that they are no longer doing work on that piece of equipment, unless directed by the commissioning group."
This room is the distribution system for the main turbine/generator and boiler building.
(Joel Dingman): "As we get wires pulled through all the cable trays and pulled into the buckets and the distribution system that's internal to the plant site, we're slowly getting equipment off of that construction power and using the power off the grid to help keep us moving ahead."
Dingman says the blue tags are important for coordinating schedules between contractors and Basin Electric employees -- and also for safety.
(Joel Dingman): "There's still a lot of buckets in the motor control center that are not completed. So it's important that we maintain control of equipment that feeds from this to there, so that contractors can continue to work on that portion of the system, and yet we can commission this portion."
The pumps and motors under Basin Electric's control are monitored from a temporary control room. The permanent control room is still under construction.
Today, control room operators are watching the turbine lube oil flush.
(Joel Dingman): "We're pumping oil at about 2,000 gallons per minute through the entire lube oil system to flush it, any impurities that might be in there."
Oil will flush through the system for about a month. Once complete, the oil will be drained out and sent away, and fresh clean oil will replace it.
(Joel Dingman): "Once we're satisfied that that's reliable and dependable, we'll put the turbine on turning gear. We'll turn it at about 3 rpm. 3-5 rpm,
constantly, from then on, until we start it up."
The water demineralization system, or demin, for short, has been considered fully functional since the end of June. Now, it's being commissioned.
(Jeremy Dvorak): "All along the line, we take water samples and do chemical analysis on the water to make sure each piece of equipment is doing what it needs to do at the right step."
Jeremy Dvorak is a lead lab tech at Dry Fork Station.
(Jeremy Dvorak): "Basically, our goal here is to take water out of the ground from a well and clean it up so that it's pure to send to the boiler. The boiler requires super pure water. If you don't the boiler and the generator and the turbine are gonna break in short order."
Because the demin system takes water from three wells, 4,000
feet deep, the water is actually quite pure to begin with. The water comes into the tank you see here, just beyond the waste water pond, and then heads into the water treatment building for demin. Any waste water flows back to this pond, where is stored to be used in other areas of the plant.
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Commissioning of Pyrolysis Plantby husharmanus1,547 views
I like that plant setup....lots of room to move about...
eosrk 10 months ago