GE Vernova mentioned it has secured an order with Dominion Vitality South Carolina to modernize two hydropower items on the Saluda Hydro facility on the Saluda River about 10 miles west of Columbia, South Carolina. The corporate on Dec. 2 mentioned the challenge “will assist prolong the lifetime, reliability, efficiency, and operational flexibility of the facility plant that has been producing sustainable and dependable energy for nearly a century.”
Dominion and GE Vernova on Monday mentioned the collaboration builds on a longstanding relationship between the businesses throughout all three GE Vernova enterprise segments, together with Energy, Wind, and Electrification. Dominion Vitality at current leverages GE Vernova know-how in about 70% of the utility’s era fleet.
The modernization challenge, together with extending the Saluda facility’s lifetime and optimizing the plant’s efficiency, additionally will help the water high quality of the Saluda River by rising dissolved oxygen by means of the implementation of GE Vernova’s aerating turbine know-how. The corporate on Monday mentioned the brand new gear “oxygenates the water and ensures a minimal degree of oxygen, contributing to guard aquatic life and the state’s pure sources.”
Saluda Hydro, which has operated since Dec. 1, 1930, is a 207.3-MW hydropower plant with 5 Francis generators. The fifth unit on the plant has operated since 1971. The Saluda Dam on the website was initially constructed to help the facility provide for the area’s textile trade. The dam additionally helped with flood management and recreation within the space; it facilitated building of Lake Murray, a 48,000-acre reservoir.
“Our present generators at Saluda Hydro have carried out safely and efficiently for greater than 90 years,” mentioned Dominion Vitality Vice President of Era Iris Griffin. “Investing of their alternative will assist keep the ability’s long-term reliability and, most significantly, proceed to securely serve our clients for a few years to come back.”
Frederic Ribieras, Hydro Energy CEO for GE Vernova, mentioned, “Our staff is delighted to convey its superior resolution to a website that has been serving the state for nearly a century. This challenge reveals that by means of each electrical energy era and water administration, hydropower can present many advantages to communities, for a really very long time.”
GE Vernova’s scope of labor consists of the engineering, procurement, building, and set up of an aerating turbine to exchange the Unit 1 and Unit 3 generators, in addition to the rehabilitation of the Unit 3 generator. The primary unit is predicted to be retrofitted by 2027.
GE Vernova has been growing patented and superior aerating hydropower turbine know-how, and has labored on innovating dissolved oxygen know-how throughout greater than 20 years of analysis and growth. The corporate’s work within the sector consists of the Excessive Rock challenge in North Carolina. Excessive Rock is a part of the 215-MW Yadkin Undertaking, a collection of 4 hydroelectric stations, dams, and reservoirs alongside a 38-mile stretch of the Yadkin River about 75 miles from Charlotte. North Carolina.
Ribieras mentioned, “As one of many oldest sources of renewable vitality within the nation, the ~100 gigawatts put in base [of hydropower] is growing older, and we see giant alternatives for modernization initiatives to enabling to ship much more renewable vitality into the grid and assist speed up the vitality transition within the nation.”
Hydropower represents about 27% of U.S. utility-scale renewable vitality, in response to the U.S. Dept. of Vitality (DOE). The DOE has mentioned hydropower has a 5.7% share of total U.S. utility-scale electrical energy output.
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).
