Old King Coal returns to Wales
22 Aug 2000
Dating back to the early 1960s, the Fifoots Point coal-fired power station, near Newport in Wales, has been mothballed for five years. Now owned by US electricity generation giant AES, the station needed extensive updating before it could be reopened.
The contract for updating the station went to ABB. The company began by refurbishing the station's boilers, installing low-NOx boilers and a flue-gas desulphurisation system, along with a management system which controls the burners and associated coal milling while providing safety cutouts to prevent explosions.
Based on the Advant OCS control system, the new installation uses around 5000 I/O points and six separate controllers, two for each of the three boilers. Other enhancements to the station include low-profile cooling towers which use secondary treated sewage rather than river water, thereby avoiding raising the river temperature and harming the local flora and fauna.
The station will use 800,000tpa of coal, almost three-quarters of which will be sourced locally; this demand has lead to the reopening of a local mine and a section of railway to supply the station. `We estimate that there is at least 15 years life left in the station,' comments Mike Wheeler, team leader at Fifoots Point.
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