Power Station refurbishment fits around bird nesting
2H Water Technologies Ltd have enabled E.ON to complete an outage (major refurbishment project) at Connahs Quay Power Station on the Dee Estuary against a series of potentially hugely disruptive circumstances including the nesting of a protected rare bird which meant closing the site.
Power Station outages are major projects requiring long term logistics planning to ensure minimum downtime of the plant. For this project the original order for 2H Polypropylene (PP) Media Pack was placed in March for the scheduled refurbishment from June to July. The PP foils were manufactured in Germany and shipped to the UK for final assembly and storage ready for installation by Promanex, E.ON’s Cooling Tower Services Provider. Scheduled transfer of part of the media order to the Connahs Quay site commenced in April, but E.ON requested a change to the plan and to accommodate this 2H agreed to store the balance and reschedule production.
At the end of May it was all change again. A rare Plover bird had set up a nest in the media pack already on site. Connahs Quay, as with all power stations, invest a great deal of time and money to reduce their environmental impact. The station is sited on the Dee estuary which is a site of international importance for wildfowl and waders and designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) so the area was sealed off to prevent disturbance. This then meant that all the media being stored by 2H now had to be transported to the Connahs Quay site so that the outage of the Cooling Towers could be completed in the scheduled refurbishment timetable.
Cooling towers such as those at Connahs Quay are considered the most efficient way of cooling process water. The construction and operation of these require the use of efficient fill pack, drift eliminators and air inlet louvres. 2H PLASdek™ plastic fill pack solutions have been utilised over several phases of the plant’s life as the unique nature of the cross fluted structure of the PLASdek™ fill facilitates an efficient air/water interaction.
The use of media constructed from PP is also of environmental importance as 2H’s unique welding manufacturing process means that it does not use solvents needed for the traditional gluing assembly method.