View of the Plant - my job for the last 1.5 years.
Today I received a picture of the plant from the customer. The older part of the plant has two large concrete smokestacks that are around 225m tall. This photo was taken from one of the smokestacks looking down on the new gas turbines that we installed over the last year. The new triple smokestack is over 100m tall. The picture was taken just a few weeks ago and shows little more than the new part of the plant. The water you see is taken off of the Muzza Canal and is used by the plant for cooling and proceeds to supply nearby fields before what is left drains into the Adda river.
I always have a hard time conveying the scale of the equipment I work with. Each of these gas turbines is rated for approximately 250 megawatts. They consume fuel at an incredible rate. You might be familiar with the little white 20 pound propane tanks that many people in N. America supply their BBQ with. They cost roughly $10 and last all summer. Each of these gas turbines burn one of those in less than a second at full load.
You also hear a lot of discussion about wind energy. My personal thought is that it has a time and a place but it will never be a dominant source of electricity. This picture shows that in the space of a couple football fields there is 750MW of electricity produced. Most new wind turbines are in the 1-3MW size range so it would take roughly 250-500 wind turbines to produce the same amount of power. Imagine how much real estate that many wind turbines would take up?
I always have a hard time conveying the scale of the equipment I work with. Each of these gas turbines is rated for approximately 250 megawatts. They consume fuel at an incredible rate. You might be familiar with the little white 20 pound propane tanks that many people in N. America supply their BBQ with. They cost roughly $10 and last all summer. Each of these gas turbines burn one of those in less than a second at full load.
You also hear a lot of discussion about wind energy. My personal thought is that it has a time and a place but it will never be a dominant source of electricity. This picture shows that in the space of a couple football fields there is 750MW of electricity produced. Most new wind turbines are in the 1-3MW size range so it would take roughly 250-500 wind turbines to produce the same amount of power. Imagine how much real estate that many wind turbines would take up?