Occuring less than two years after the September 11th attacks, the August 14, 2003, blackout “again pointed out our vulnerability, ” says Neil Karr, head of project management for ALSTOM Power Rentals (APR). Much of the entire region of Ontario was hit, along with much of the Eastern Seaboard of the US and Canada.

“During the blackout,” Karr continues “our generator units at the Ontario Energy Management project site ran for three days as the main power grid steadily came back online.” Thus APR’s Ontario Energy Management project was able to do exactly what it was meant to do—be part of a system that could supply peaking power during a time of high demand for power.

Project Background and Rationale
In April 2003, the local utility in southern Ontario started looking for a significant amount of additional power generation—200 MW of power or more. The power was to be distributed around much of that region of Ontario. The reason for the project was simply to provide additional power during periods of peak electricity usage. “It was really installed as a security measure, or an insurance policy,” says Paul Marcroft, business development manager for APR, “and to support the existing infrastructure system during the peak periods.”

To fulfill this need, Ontario Energy Management Inc. (OEM) and APR were awarded a temporary power contract for Ontario, Canada, for 20 MW. The customer, Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC), decided that the Transportable Tempest gas turbine generating system could contribute to solving their problem.

One other factor may have been that the elections were coming up in a short while. “I think, perhaps, the government wanted to make sure that they didn’t have any lights out during this election period,” suggests Marcroft, “that is my opinion, perhaps, rather than the facts. But whatever the case, they wanted extra power to meet demands during the peaks—whether it was political or not.”

“It was to prevent rolling blackouts,” adds Christopher L. Hobbs, project engineer with Peninsula Engineering and Ontario Energy Management. “When the whole Eastern Seaboard was hit by the blackout last August 2003, we were able to run through the entire period. ALSTOM Power Rentals did a very good job for us through the entire project. Almost all the details of setting up their project were very much cookie cutter in nature. The engines arrived July 24th and on August 1st we were putting full power into the grid. The total time involved was one week.” Says Hobbs, “If that’s not unusual, then there’s not anything unusual out there. That is extraordinary. I challenge anybody, using as many hours in the day they want, to meet my week.”

There were other proponents selected during the bidding process. “They were all awarded with a contract,” says Hobbs, “but for a variety of reasons, timing or whatever, they could not deliver. Only three of these actually delivered. We were one of the three. The other two proponents were multibillion-dollar-per-year companies, Caterpillar and Trans-Canada Pipeline.”

The decision to proceed with the project was made on June 6, 2003, by the Canadian government. “Ontario Energy Management did have some hiccups along the way,” says Hobbs, “but fortunately none of them had anything to do with ALSTOM.”

When asked if there were any lessons to be learned from this project, Hobbs says, “I can’t think of anything in particular. It was a lot of work to put those things in for such a short duration. But then again, those units really are designed to be mobile and easily connectable. That it all worked out so well was certainly a pleasant surprise for us.”

“The government’s expectation was to put in temporary power generation, which would allow them to make it through their peak generation periods,” says Karr, “This was in the event that they lost one of their own units or in the event that demand went too high. So what they ended up doing was putting in several sites with generation capabilities. In the blackout these enabled everybody to go online.”

The APR equipment didn’t actually run much at all. It just sat there for the six months of the contract in anticipation of a problem. So it was strictly a peaking plant. “But the fact of the matter was,” says Paul Marcroft, “it was never really run very much because the high peaks never materialized.”

“It was not a single-source setup,” says Marcroft, “there were a number of different authorized generators in the area that were successful in winning part of the project. There were also several different technologies being applied and ALSTOM was fortunate enough to get 20 megawatts.”

“The OEFC was the end customer,” says Karr, “We partnered with OEM to provide generation. They [OEM] did the transmission and distribution, essentially, and we provided equipment as well as startup services. It was kind of a partnership there. GE and Cat were in similar situations but with different companies.”

Project Requirements
On April 28, 2003, OEFC—self-described as “an agency of the Province of Ontario responsible for servicing/retiring the former Ontario Hydro’s debt and managing other legacy liabilities...”—issued an RFP, for “Provision of Temporary Generation Resources in Ontario for the Summer and Autumn of 2003.” This request included a 30-page document containing details on the requested services as well as stringent physical requirements and submission guidelines. This temporary generation facility was to be located somewhere east of London, ONT, south of Owen Sound/Barrie, yet not on the Niagara Peninsula. The site selected by OEM was in Hamilton, on the McMasters University campus.

Major concerns and thus requirements disclosed in OEFC’s RFP specified that proposals include detailed descriptions of the project’s impact on air emissions, noise levels, potential soil disruption or contamination, and containment concerns of nearby water courses. Proposals needed to assert that compliance was made to all “federal, provincial, regional or municipal governments.”

Those submitting proposals also had to include a demonstrated ability to comply with the requirements of the Environmental Protection Act and the Ministry of Environment regulations, policies, and standards. Other requirements included plans for telemetry, fuel management and metering, as well as operating and voice communication plans.

Since OEFC’s stated deadline for all proposal submissions was May 12, 2003—a mere two weeks after it was issued—those companies trying to win the bid had a lot of work to do, very quickly.

Regarding whether there were many other companies available to complete this project, Karr offers, “In smaller generation there are quite a few people out there. But in what I would call big power in the turbine area, there are really only two or three players. It’s a pretty limited playing field. The technology is expensive and it takes expertise to install and run it—which the smaller players just don’t have.”

Were there other options out there for this particular project? Neil Karr has a fairly simple answer, “As far as alternatives to this project, the only one I can think of is if they’d taken the risk and not installed it. But they took the other option and went with having power generation to help them. The OEFC and the Canadian government simply had to call us to tell us whether to proceed or not and to choose a supplier.”

APR and the Ontario Energy Management Project
OEM—the local, authorized Canadian power generation company—was APR’s customer. But the ultimate customer on the project, as mentioned earlier, was OEFC. After their request for a proposal was out, all bids were submitted by May 2003, and the equipment needed to be operational by around July or August of that same year. APR’s contract then ran through a six-month period until the early part of this year, and the equipment was demobilized in February.

The McMasters University campus site was chosen mainly because a natural gas pipeline and high voltage interconnect were both in close proximity. The project was based on the outskirts of the university campus.

There were three units to the project, located around the fringes of the university campus. The whole system was installed very quickly. As Marcroft explains, “It was fast-tracked. In other words the project stood basically operational within only a few days from the delivery onto the site. Then we were really on a call-out basis. If they anticipated that the equipment needed to be run, then we would be there within a certain timeframe. But ultimately we were responsible for 24-hour local coverage.”

The utility then would make predictions or projections as far as trending. Things such as the weather for the previous day—given that there might be a particularly hot day in the summer or cold day in the autumn—would indicate if they may or may not have an issue. But, as APR discovered throughout the contract, there was never really the demand that was anticipated. Whether that means that they’d had an especially mild summer and autumn—without the extreme heat and cold—is difficult to determine exactly.

This was an interesting project for APR because they were working very closely with OEM, the local company authorized to actually do the project. APR could not deal directly with OEFC. The reason for this was that APR was not an authorized Canadian generation company. Thus OEM actually did the contract with OEFC and APR was essentially back-to-back with OEM on this job.

“But we worked really closely with them on everything,” says Marcroft, “and it went very well. The local generation companies were tasked with locating a suitable site, and we found that many of them had existing relationships with local transmission companies, generating companies, and other outfits. So what they had to do was locate a site that had a suitable integration point into the grid, as well as access to fuel.”

Fuel was very important. The Canadian government wanted the project to be gas-fired because they wanted low emissions. “The local companies didn’t just come out, get the equipment, install it on the site and run it,” says Marcroft, “they had to find a suitable site, obtain the permits, and then get the fuel to that site. Though there were multiple considerations—including fuel, permitting, and physical space—a chief consideration was the interconnect point, or how they were actually going to get the power onto the grid.”

APR provided OEM with the compact, transportable Tempest, which was important given that the amount of space on this site was relatively restricted. The three 7.9 MW (ISO) Tempests were dual fuel, dry low emission (DLE) units that were efficient, environmentally friendly, and reliable. Paul Marcroft says, “It really helped that APR’s transportable Tempest gas turbine generating system represents more kilowatts per square foot than any other gas-fired technology out there, which was critical because they wanted to squeeze as much power onto that site as they could.”

As Neil Karr points out, “Our expected results in the end actually matched reality fairly well. When we were called to run, the units came up and ran nicely. During the blackout, they really got what I would call their exercise. Canada was fortunate in that period of time when all of this generation was there that they really didn’t need it at the end of the day. They ran very seldom until the blackout. Then, when the blackout occurred, that’s when the units paid for themselves.

“There was a little bit of a learning curve when it came to the differences between Canadian versus American regulations. But I think as a team everybody pretty much worked it all out and did very well.”

No Major Problems or Hiccups
There were lots of variables that OEM had to consider. They had to consider how many Tempests they could put onsite; they managed to fit three. They also required gas fuel, which they could get onsite, but had to rent a gas compressor to raise the pressure, according to the requirements of the Tempest.

Then they had to look at transmission. The University of Hamilton had an interconnect system into the main grid, so OEM saw an opportunity that was local to where they wanted to site the equipment. The power rental company did not supply a transformer. “I am not sure if OEM did or did not,” says Marcroft, “but otherwise it would have been just 13.8 KV of voltage to have it up onto the transmission lines.”

It was OEM’s responsibility to take the three Tempests, apply for environmental permitting for those Tempests, and to obtain whatever permits it needed in order to get the equipment in place. It was quite challenging for them. “The OEFC were stating,” says Marcroft, “ ‘this is how much power we need and these are the key critical areas around Ontario for distributed power generation—what can you do for us?’ It was particularly challenging for the local generating companies involved.”

APR bid its units to numerous different companies who were looking at other gas turbines and small gas engines of all different sizes for the same job.

The OEFC, however, was ultimately only looking for 200 MW. So it was a close call for APR because it found itself bidding to these different companies, but they only had a finite amount of equipment.

“There were a lot of subjective availabilities going on,” says Marcroft, “and in the end we did get this particular deal. It worked really well for us. There was a lot of GE equipment, a lot of CAT equipment—generally a real mixture of equipment up there—but in terms of operation I don’t think much of it actually ran at all. It was just installed, sat there for six months, and ran for a few hours. APR fast-tracks power into places that need it for a temporary project. It was never meant to be permanent. For this particular site it was just meant to cover their peak period.”

For APR there were some challenges with respect to logistics, especially with the equipment. The equipment was coming out of Houston, TX; so shipping it all up to Ontario was quite a lengthy process

When it came time to work out the details of transportation, the logistics team had to work closely with each state and find out which were the most lenient in their rules and restrictions. APR’s equipment got routed through these states. The equipment was successfully trucked to the site following normal roads all the way to the Canadian border and then on into Hamilton, ON.

These particular Tempest units are designed specifically for fast tracking—rapid installation and rapid start. Thus, this wasn’t the standard package. It was designed to sit on virtually any foundation and, rather than taking weeks to set up, would take a matter of days to have the units up and operational. As the APR Project Profile describes the setup, “On delivery to site, the turbine and ancillary equipment needed to be positioned on a level surface, but no special concrete foundations were required.”

A standard Tempest gas turbine generating package would take in the region of four to five weeks to actually setup, commission, and have ready for commercial operation. APR and OEM completed the exercise for all three units in about a week. But it helped that they’d been tested on APR’s own site before installation on their customer’s site. It was also the first time they’d been set up and actually used in a commercial application.

APR’s Marcroft doesn’t recall anything being a major problem, either during the initial execution or throughout the contract. “There might have been some minor things just during commissioning. But from what I can gather, all three units were setup, installed, and operational relatively quickly. I don’t think there were any major issues along the way and I don’t know of any major hiccups with permitting or anything at OEM’s end.”

“In terms of the original scope of the project,” adds APR’s Neil Karr, “everything was pretty well successful.… We weren’t prepared to run under blackout conditions, because it wasn’t in the original scope or requirement of the units. When the blackout hit it took them a little while to find a startup generator to black-start these big units. That was a little bit of a problem. But we did locate one locally, wire it in, and fire up the units. The original scope or requirements of the unit weren’t such to do that. It’s not hard to do—as long as you know how. Nobody expected the whole grid to go black. The blackout validated what they had done.

“The nature of the exposure and the opportunity was the greatest reward for us. That is our business model. Just the reward of being chosen to do this job was reward enough for us. The blackout just proved to be an opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities—which we weren’t expecting to do.”

In a world where blackouts and all sorts of other problems are a very real possibility, temporary—and fast—power generation is a necessity. The APR Temporary Power Project with OEM in Hamilton, ON, proves it.

PETER HILDEBRANDT writes extensively on engineering and scientific subjects.

DE - May/June 2005