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HYDRO REPORT
Hydro-Québec Teams With GE Hydro To Expand Power Supply
Hydro-Québec, Québec's provincial utility, generates 96 per cent of its total power output from hydroelectric plants, providing its more than 3.5 million customers with electricity at rates that are among the lowest in North America. To meet Québec's growing domestic load demand and to capitalize on lucrative wholesale energy markets, Hydro-Québec is increasing its generating capability with the goal of producing at least an additional 12TWh of electricity annually by 2006.
Much of this added capacity will come from the construction of new, large hydroelectric plants, but Hydro-Québec is also focusing on refurbishing many of its 51 existing hydro plants as the most cost-effective way to further maximize its power supplies. The company is pursuing a strategy of evaluating all of its existing generating stations for possible upgrades to ensure their long-term operability and improve their performance at optimum cost.
Hydro-Québec recently began a multi-phase project to completely modernize two of its older, 48-MW hydro plants to improve their reliability and generating capacity. The Rapide-2 and Rapide-7 hydropower plants, built in the 1940s and 1950s, are part of a succession of run-of-river plants located on the Outaouais River in Québec's Abitibi Témiscamingue region. These plants operate interdependently for about 15 hours a day, making their reliable operation critical to the region's power supply because an outage at either of these facilities also affects the generating capacity of the other plants down river.
In the first phase of the upgrade project, Hydro-Québec set out to replace all four original, 12-megawatt generators at each of the two plants. Following a thorough competitive bid process, Hydro-Québec awarded a CDN$40 million contract for the provision of the generators to its long-time supplier, GE Hydro. GE Hydro has been working with Hydro-Québec for almost a century, providing hydroelectric turbines, generators and associated equipment for both new and existing large and small hydro projects from its Lachine, Québec, manufacturing facility.
The eight generators for the Rapide-2 and Rapide-7 projects will be supplied from the Lachine plant, with the generator excitation systems supplied from ABB. These new, more powerful, 19 MVA generators will enable Hydro-Québec to increase the plants' power output by 25 per cent, to 60 MW, by allowing the turbines' full production capacity to be realized. Although more power will be available to Hydro-Québec, immediate plans are to sell the added VARs of generating capacity provided by the new generators to neighboring networks. Once the new generators are operating, Hydro-Québec will evaluate the plants' 20-meter-head Francis turbines, last upgraded by GE Hydro two decades earlier, to determine if runner replacements would help them to achieve even greater generating capacity.
Engineering and materials sourcing for the project are now under way and work is proceeding on schedule. The generator units will be shipped by GE Hydro at the rate of one per year to the Rapide-7 and Rapide-2 sites, beginning in March and April 2003, respectively, and concluding in 2006.
To meet the project's tight timetable, GE Hydro has developed some strategies to save time and minimize costs for Hydro-Québec. For example, GE will manage the installation of the generators at the two plant sites, located about an hour's drive apart, from a single location using shared site services instead of duplicating these resources at each site. To minimize power generation losses during installation, GE Hydro plans to begin installing the generators in May of each year to take full advantage of the river's high water level, when only two or three of the turbines are normally operating.
The relatively small size of the Rapide-2 and Rapide-7 power plants, whose four 129-inch diameter turbines are compactly arranged side-by-side with only a small installation bay, also presents some challenges to the installation of the new generators. GE Hydro has developed streamlined methods for dismantling and re-assembling equipment to ensure that the project meets the allotted outage schedule. Pre-assembly of equipment in-shop will help limit the onsite workload.
Careful co-ordination and follow-up between the engineering, sourcing and installation teams, and the selection of suppliers able to meet project deadlines without compromising quality, will also play a major role in helping to reduce the project's cycle time.
"GE Hydro is positioning itself to be able to adapt to any unforeseen customer needs that inevitably arise during the course of a refurbishment project such as this. We are committed to doing everything we can to deliver this project to Hydro-Quebec on time," said Gilles Girard, Canadian sales manager for GE Hydro.
The Rapide-7 generator unit is set to be commissioned in September 2003, followed by Rapide-2 in October 2003, with this same schedule repeated successively over the following three years for the remaining six turbines.
Meanwhile, GE Hydro is working with Hydro-Québec to assess potential improvements at many of its other existing hydro facilities, as well as providing equipment for new hydro plant projects such as the 517-megawatt Toulnustouc River hydropower station, scheduled for completion in August 2005. ET
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