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Great Plains Power Station site takes delivery of heavy-duty gas turbine

The gas-powered turbine that will be the heart of the Great Plains Power Station was delivered to the Burns & McDonnell-managed construction site on May 24 as the Spring 2022 “site goes vertical” phase gets underway.

The gas-powered turbine that will be the heart of the Great Plains Power Station was delivered to the Burns & McDonnell-managed construction site on May 24 as the spring 2022 “site goes vertical” phase gets underway.

The turbine is a Siemens SGT6-5000F heavy-duty gas turbine, which will spin at 60 revolutions per second (Hz) or 3,600 revolutions per minute.

“What’s important to note about this facility is that it’s similar to the one we have operating in Swift Current right now — Chinook Power Station,” explained Joel Cherry, media relations consultant at SaskPower. “It’s a combined-cycle power station. So that’s compared to a simple cycle natural gas power station, which we have elsewhere in the province.”

If the new Great Plains Power Station turbine were run as a simple cycle, it would generate around 260 mW of electricity. Combined-cycle means that the 600-Celsius exhaust heat from the turbine is directed to power an additional, steam-driven turbine. The combined total from the gas turbine and the steam turbine is 360 mW.

Those 360 megawatts could, in theory, power 360,000 Saskatchewan homes each year.

In practice, SaskPower has many industrial and commercial customers — powering private residences is not the only requirement for the grid.

The turbine is like a big jet engine, Cherry said — it is quite big, outweighing a Boeing 747-400 passenger jet by 33,567 kg/74,000 lb — and is driven by a fuel-air mixture, with a stellar reputation for reliability and an excellent emissions score relative to coal-fired plants.

The most important ability those twinned turbines have is a fast response time, which makes them an ideal complement to SaskPower’s rapidly increasing renewable energy capacity.

SaskPower brought 400 mW of renewable energy online last fiscal year — as of March 31, 2022. Another 110 mW of solar energy will come online in the next couple of years, as will hundreds more megawatts of wind energy.

Distributing many smaller-scale renewable energy plants across the province means more consistent power generation as the wind blows more or less and cloud cover comes and goes. When supply dips below demand, natural gas plants can ramp up within just a few minutes to close the gap.

Most of the underground work at the Great Plains Power Station is complete now, Cherry said, enabling the turbine delivery.

“We’re starting to put up girders and do the actual vertical work there,” he said. “So yeah, that’s the time when it’s appropriate to start bringing the major equipment in.”

The plant is scheduled to come online in 2024.

“We are also pleased with the local investment that we’ve seen,” Cherry added. “We committed to exceeding our local and Indigenous procurement on the project, above what we did with the Chinook Power Station in Swift Current, and we’re already well on track for that. We’ve already exceeded our target for Indigenous procurement, I think we have $11 million invested, along with the work from local business suppliers. There’s a lot of very positive economic spin-off.”

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