You are currently browsing the Diesel Generator News and Reviews weblog archives for June, 2008.
30. June 2008 by admin.
The Bahamas Electricity Corporation said that faulted cables at the Blue Hills Power Station were the cause of an island-wide blackout in New Providence that lasted for more than four hours in some areas on Friday.
According to a press statement released by the corporation late Friday, an 11,000 volt cable within the Blue Hills Power Station compound faulted.
“The force of the cable fault caused a nearby 33,000 volts generator cable to be damaged by a manhole cover,” the press release said. “This resulted in an island-wide outage as all generators tripped offline.”
According to the corporation, around 4:53pm Friday, the first set of customers began to receive power.
However, some areas experienced some delays.
“There were delays in the restoration process as due to safety and technical reasons a number of cables within the Blue Hills compound had to be isolated,” the statement said.
“This isolation restricted the amount of generators that could be put in service until all testing was completed.”
The corporation reported that by 10pm all of the services were restored.
BEC apologized for the inconveniences caused as a result of the outage.
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29. June 2008 by admin.
— From Cresaptown to Romney, W.Va., two lines of rapid-moving thunderstorms swept down trees in their path and left thousands of people without power Saturday evening.
Allegany and Garrett counties were under a severe thunderstorm watch until 1 a.m. Sunday, while to the south, Hampshire and Mineral counties were faced with a storm warning.
In Allegany County, 1,544 Allegheny Power customers were without electricity when a transformer blew out during the first line of thunderstorms, a spokesman with the Allegany County Office of Emergency Management said.
The blackout left people from Bowling Green to Cresaptown in the dark, including inmates at the Allegany County Detention Center, where a spokeswoman said a generator was keeping the lights on until Allegheny Power crews could find and fix the problem.
People were also without power in Keyser, Westernport and Mountain Lake Park, according to the utility company’s Web site.
Downed trees were believed to have caused at least part of the outages reported in Kitzmiller, Swallow Falls, Barton and throughout Hampshire County.
A spokeswoman with the Hampshire County Office of Emergency Management and 911 said a transformer blew in Romney, while Springfield, Levels, Augusta and Capon Springs all had trees down.
In Mineral County, a tree fell into a house along state Route 972 in New Creek.
The fire department’s unable to get the tree off. They’re going to have a tree removal company come in since the tree put a hole in the roof, a spokesman with the Mineral County Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security said. No one was home when the 6:33 p.m. incident occurred, he said.
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26. June 2008 by admin.
Troy Utilities had a rather “nutty” power situation on their hands Wednesday morning. Two squirrels were the cause of an hour-long blackout within the homes and businesses of many in the city, according to General Manager of Utilities James Flowers. Around 8 a.m. Wednesday, Flowers said the utility company was notified of a blackout that had occurred along the southeast side of town. Flowers said the outage resulted from the squirrels in a substation on Park Street.
“The squirrels caused an electrical fire that damaged a switch in the substation,” Flowers said.
For about an hour, residents and businesses on George Wallace Drive, a portion of U.S. 231 South and the area of Second Avenue were all without power Wednesday.Wal-Mart Manager Bobby Brackenridge said their store was affected by the blackout, but they were able to keep business going as usual. “We had no issues,” Brackenridge said. “We kept our customers going as usual.” While Wal-Mart does not have a store generator, Brackenridge said they were able to get enough light for customers to continue shopping, and they did not have to throw out any food. “We got enough skylights in here to keep it going,” Brackenridge said. During the blackout, the Troy Police Department assisted by directing traffic at intersections where traffic lights were out. By 9 a.m., Flowers said the power was back on.
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25. June 2008 by admin.
The fierce windstorm that swept through the region on June 7 did more than tear a few shingles off people’s roofs; it sent a 5,900-kilogram hydro tower tumbling to the ground at about mileage 47 up the Fraserdale Road.
The huge 500-kilovolt tower moves electricity, up to 800 megawatts, out of Abitibi Canyon, mainly from Ontario Power Generation’s Otter Rapids installation. With wind gusting up to over 50 km/h that day, the tower crumpled, said Hydro One spokesperson Daniele Gauvin.
“That is very rare,” she said.
With that tower down, it effectively cut off the Otter Rapids generating station from the electricity grid for about a week, said Greg Towns, Hydro One’s distribution superintendent for the northeast. It is fortunate that the blowdown occurred when it did, he added, because had it occurred in the heat of the summer, demand would have far exceeded generating capacity, and Ontario would have been forced to purchase power from out of province.
“Power couldn’t get out of the bottleneck, so the total generating capacity was reduced,” Mr. Towns said. “The week had been cool so the demand was less and there was enough capacity to meet [it].”
Battling wet weather and clouds of blackflies, it took workers a week to prepare the pad to install a new tower. Once that was done, on June 14 a 234 Chinook helicopter with a lift capacity of 12,700 kilograms (28,000 pounds) carried the new tower from the assembly area to the site.
Mr. Towns said it took less time to get the tower to the site than it did to get it into place. By 8 p.m. on June 11, the power was flowing again.
Pieces of the downed tower are being examined to determine why it failed, and, depending on the findings, that could see Hydro One undertake a general inspection of all the towers in the vicinity of he crash.
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25. June 2008 by admin.
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After a two-year delay, Toronto Hydro hopes to have a device moored on Lake Ontario this fall to test the breeze for a wind farm 2 kilometres off the Scarborough Bluffs.
The goal, says Toronto Hydro chief executive Dave O’Brien, is to establish a 60-turbine offshore wind farm capable of generating 100 megawatts.
It should take two years of collecting and analyzing wind-speed data to learn whether the project makes economic sense, O’Brien told councillors is a briefing yesterday. The City of Toronto is the utility’s sole shareholder.
Toronto Hydro first proposed the idea two years ago, but the Ontario government placed a moratorium on offshore wind projects. The moratorium was recently lifted.
The wind measurement instrument, or anemometer, would rise only 3 metres above the water’s surface but would measure the wind speed at 30 metres, the height of the turbine blades.
“We hope by October-November we’ll have it in place,” O’Brien said in an interview.
Winds out on the lake tend to blow more steadily, he said.
The intended site, off the bluffs, is ideal because a natural reef rises from the lake bed there, he said. The water is only about 10 metres deep, making it much easier to anchor turbines on the bottom.
O’Brien said the lake is much deeper elsewhere along the Toronto shoreline, so there won’t be a string of turbines extending from Scarborough to Etobicoke.
It would take two to three years to chart wind speeds, get regulatory approval and install the wind farm, O’Brien said.
The turbines contemplated would be much bigger than the 0.75-megawatt turbine in operation at Exhibition Place, generating 1.5 to 2 megawatts each.
O’Brien said Toronto Hydro would like to move more aggressively into alternate power sources.
Just as the city has been given unique powers because of its size and the complexity of issues it faces, Toronto Hydro should be given more authority, he said.
The utility has limited control over generating electricity, controlling high-voltage transmission lines and setting conservation programs, he said.
If it were given that authority by the Ontario Energy Board, “then we don’t have to worry about Hydro One, Ontario Power Generation, the Ontario Power Authority, all that stuff,” he said.
“We can engage the community of Toronto in these solutions.”
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23. June 2008 by admin.
A loss of supply from Hydro One left thousands of New Tecumseth residents without electricity this morning.
At about 3:40 a.m., the power went out to over 5,500 homes in Alliston, Beeton and Tottenham. Hydro crews worked to resolve the problem and had power restored by just before 6 a.m.
The loss of supply was caused by problems with the Hydro One transfer station in Alliston.
Hydro One provides electricity to Barrie Hydro, which services Alliston, Beeton and Tottenham.
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21. June 2008 by admin.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A blistering heat wave blanketing much of the California coast over the past week showed no signs of letting up Saturday as temperatures headed back toward triple digits.
Power was restored Saturday to almost all the 8,000 customers that were blacked out the day before when electrical demand skyrocketed because of the heat, said Terry Schneider, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Energy demand was expected to remain at peak levels into the weekend and the department had about 50 crews standing by to handle any overload problems, Schneider said.
“The system is under tremendous strain to meet the energy demand,” he said.
Temperatures hit record highs up and down the state Friday, including 103 degrees at San Jose, 105 at Escondido, 106 at Burbank and 108 at San Luis Obispo.
The heat wave has been caused by northeasterly wind preventing sea breezes from penetrating a high-pressure system that has settled over the West.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger directed the state Office of Emergency Services to be on standby through the weekend.
One death has been linked to the heat, a 77-year-old woman who apparently left her car near the California-Arizona line south of Lake Havasu, Ariz., on Monday in search of her elderly husband, who was hospitalized for treatment of burns. Temperatures hit 116 in the area Monday.
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19. June 2008 by admin.
Saving on fuel isn’t a question of conservation for the military. It’s about saving lives.
The U.S. Army is testing two prototype generators in Iraq that run on garbage, rather than diesel fuel.
The Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery (TGER, pronounced “tiger”), was co-developed with Purdue University and deployed in May at Victory Base camp in Baghdad, where it will be tested until August.
The purpose of the unit is to cut down on the amount of diesel fuel used and to cut down on the amount of garbage that camps generate, which are both security risks.
“Those convoys that carry fuel are also known as targets,” said James Valdes, scientific adviser for biotechnology at the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Command. “Officers say ‘We don’t calculate the cost of fuel in dollars, we calculate it in blood.’”
Handling garbage is a logistical challenge, too, because the Army hires contractors who need to be followed.
Right now, the Army’s trash goes up in smoke by burning it. The problem with incinerators, though, is that they require a lot of energy to run and many people to operate it.
TGER uses a variety of technologies to fuel a standard 60-kilowatt electrical generator.
People put trash into a chute and then the wet waste–like food slop–is separated from the rest. The cardboard, plastic, and other dry trash are crushed and pelletized.
Those pellets are then put into a gasifier, which heats them until they turn into synthetic gas–fuel for the generator.
Developers found that the relatively low-grade fuel from the trash over-heated the generators and maxed output at about 40 kilowatts.
So it created a system to convert the sugar-rich wet wastes (apparently, U.S. soldiers drink a good amount of Kool-Aid) into a form of ethanol. The wet waste is treated with enzymes and then fermented into hydrous ethanol–a mix of 85 percent pure ethanol and water, Valdes explained.
That ethanol is blended in with the synthetic gas, which boosts the generator’s output to 55 kilowatts.
Starting up the contraption takes 6 hours and still requires 5 percent of the diesel the generator usually uses, or about 1 gallon per hour.
Compared to an incinerator, TGER is far more efficient at converting garbage to usable energy, said Valdes, who also said it runs at 90 percent efficiency. And it significantly cuts down on the amount of garbage that needs to be trucked around.
“Ultimately, what we would like to do is have a clean-sheet design so that you could automate it more. So you literally put trash in one end and electricity comes out the other,” Valdes said.
If the TGER units work well in the harsh Baghdad conditions, he envisions the generator will be deployed in smaller camps, where the higher percentage of food waste can improve efficiency.
Valdes said the portable generator could also be used in disaster-relief situations where there is a lot of trash and the need for generators. The U.S. Navy has shown interest in the unit as well.
Trash, as it turns out, is an attractive feedstock. There are several commercial companies developing technologies that use wastes as fuel.
Cellulosic ethanol companies convert agricultural or forestry residues into ethanol, while portable generators use similar feedstock, such as wood chips, to make electricity.
A number of companies are also trying to convert municipal solid waste into ethanol using a range of processes.
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17. June 2008 by admin.
EL PASO, Texas - Extreme heat leads to a power outage in East El Paso. Tuesday electricity was restored.
The outage happened Monday night in the area between Montana, Joe Battle and Zaragoza.
10,000 customers went without power for hours.
The El Paso Fire Department says the outage was probably caused by too many air conditioners running at the same time.
Triple digit temps are expected throughout the next week.
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16. June 2008 by admin.
Hydro One advises Elliot Lake residents that there will be power interruptions in the city on Sunday.
On June 22, as many as 751 Hydro One customers on Esten Drive North and Esten Drive South will be without power for five hours, from 7 to 11 a.m.
In addition, later that day, up to 1,194 Hydro One customers on Ottawa Avenue will have a three-hour power interruption from noon to 3 p.m.
The affected customers will be notified by an automated phone message.
Hydro One says the power interruptions are to perform maintenance and upgrades to the equipment.
If they cannot do the work on June 22, Hydro One has set an alternate date of June 29.
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