SRP toils non-stop to fix power plant
Desert Basin is important for times of high demand
Salt River Project crews are working around the clock to make $18 million in repairs to the Desert Basin Generating Station in Casa Grande, which was damaged in February when a large bolt banged up a turbine.
The bolt broke loose and took out one of the two combustion turbines at the natural-gas-burning power plant, which also has a steam turbine and can produce 540 megawatts of power at full output.
One megawatt is enough power to supply about 250 homes at once when the plant is running.
Desert Basin is an “intermediate” power plant, which runs about half the year when power demand is high. It doesn’t run as often as “baseload” coal or nuclear plants, which run around the clock, but it operates more than “peaker” plants that run only when demand spikes.
The plant is important in summer and will be needed by July 1, or it could cost SRP and its customers $35,000 or more each day in extra fuel and purchased power costs to make up for the missing power generation, officials said.
“We anticipate it will be back online the 26th of this month,” said Dennis Gerlach, the plant manager. “We have contracted crews from Siemens (the turbine maker) and our own workforce. We are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
When one of the long mounting bolts broke free Feb. 28, a piece of it shot into the spinning turbine and damaged the blades. The 108,000pound rotor had to be trucked to North Carolina to be repaired; it returned to Arizona this month.
Desert Basin began commercial operation in 2001, and SRP bought the power plant from Reliant Resources Inc. in 2003. Unfortunately, Gerlach said, SRP did not have a warranty from either Reliant or Siemens for the damage. RYAN RANDAZZO