Burns & McDonnell has commissioned new diesel engines that allow combined-cycle facility to independently restart and restore service in event of outage.
Image: Carroll County Energy is a combined-cycle power facility operating in the PJM wholesale power market since December 2017. Photo: Courtesy of Burns & McDonnell.
Burns & McDonnell has announced the completion of start-up and commissioning of a new black start unit at the 700MW Carroll County Energy facility.
The commissioning includes configuration of four diesel-fuelled reciprocating engines, to enable the large-scale natural gas-fuelled power generating facility to independently restart in the event of a grid outage.
The diesel fuelled engines are capable of providing up to 15.6MW of continuous power over a 24hour period, and with the added capability, Carroll County Energy is expected to be one of the first power generating facilities to help restore power to the PJM transmission system.
Carroll County Energy is a combined-cycle power facility operating in the PJM wholesale power market since December 2017.
Carroll County Energy senior vice president Andrew Degon said: “Many people in Ohio remember the 2003 blackout where power could not be restored for five days. Adding black start capacity to Carroll County Energy means we can restart almost immediately in the event of a widespread outage, which is a critical step to add resilience to the PJM grid and help prevent a similar disaster in the future.”
The new capability enables Carroll County Energy to help restore power to the PJM transmission system
Since many old coal-fired facilities in the area are retired, black start capability was retrofitted on the power facility located near Carrollton, in east-central Ohio, to ensure Carroll County Energy an important source of grid stability.
Burns & McDonnell has provided engineer-procure-construct (EPC) services for the black start units, while the Burns & McDonnell’s subsidiary AZCO has performed the majority of the construction on the project.
Burns & McDonnell energy group president Rick Halil said: “Burns & McDonnell has become an industry leader in adding black start capacity within a wide range of generation plant configurations. It’s a prudent additional investment that requires a very complex engineering assessment to determine how much black start power is needed to get the main plant back online.
“In addition to sizing the diesel generators properly, we had to modify the turbine controls to enable isochronous, or island mode operation, plus modifications to the switchgear that allowed us to tie in the black start engines.”