No. 10 | May 2014 siemens.com/energy
10

www.comtest.ch/survey/livingenergy
Editorial
The various energy transitions taking place worldwide, above all in Germany, have triggered a transformation that will have an impact well beyond 2050. Energy systems will have to deal with an ever broader energy mix and operate as flexibly and efficiently as possible. Renewable energies will be industrialized and prevail in competition with conventional types of power generation. At the same time, however, coal will still play a major role, and game changers will be setting new directions. One of these changers will be hydrogen. Produced with electric­ ity from renewable sources, hydrogen can be stored in great quantities and can be used when needed to generate electricity, in transportation, or in multiple industrial applications.
Our current projects are also quite notable. In this issue, we present three examples from around the world to illustrate innovative solutions that meet specific challenges.
In Thailand’s tropical monsoon climate, for example, electricity is a decisive competitive factor for cooling – for the country’s seafood sector in particular as well as for its booming economy in general. For distributed power generation, Siemens has provided 20 SGT­800 industrial gas turbines to small private power producers, which are the drivers of Thailand’s industrialization process.
The La Caridad Power Plant in Mexico, which comprises two combined cycle units, delivers electricity to copper mines in the remote Sonora region reliably and with high efficiency.
A milestone in the southern hemisphere is the HVDC Pole 3 project, one of the biggest infra­ structure projects in the history of New Zealand. The high­voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission link that connects the North and the South Island since the 1960s has been for­ tified by a new pole and an upgrade to the existing control system. The new equipment has been designed to meet the highest earthquake safety standards.
Secure, economical, and sustainable sources of power that also enjoy societal acceptance in terms of technology, will remain one of the most exciting challenges beyond the middle of the century. To meet these challenges, we will continue working with our customers to drive highly innovative projects, explore measures for an economical energy system with politicians, and strengthen our societal dialog to win greater public acceptance of sustainable energy systems.
Enjoy the tenth issue of Living Energy!
Best regards,
Michael Suess, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of the Energy Sector
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 5

Growing up not far from Germany’s Ruhr industrial district, Marc Engelhardt
(left) had experienced an economically
declining, heavily industrialized region, which seemed a relict from the past.
Twenty years later, the journalist was as­ tonished to see that same region now shaping the country’s and indeed the world’s future, especially in the field of energy. So the Max Planck Institute in the city of Mülheim/Ruhr was the perfect setting to meet two visionaries like chem­ ist Robert Schlögl (right) and engineer
Michael Weinhold. (See p. 8)
Correspondent Sameh Fahmy spent a day at the Siemens Wind
Service Training Center in Florida to get a first­hand perspective on the safety and technical training on offer. “I was surprised by how physically demanding the technicians’ work can be,” Fahmy says. “Their harnesses and other safety equipment weigh nearly
20 pounds, and yet they climb hundreds of feet and then move like snakes through tight enclosures inside wind turbine nacelles – all the while keeping their safety and the safety of their co­workers as the top priority.” (See p.
70)
The close-knit team after a packed production day at the beach in Rayong, Thai­ land. Business and science journalist Clark Shimazu (right), photographer Hans
Sautter (left) and their young colleague, filmmaker Disspong Sampattavanich, seamlessly combined their documentary zeal and creative energy to research the correlation of Thailand’s industrialization and its strategy of distributed power generation on location at Amata City Industrial Estate, the ice factory and fishing port in Rayong. The symbiosis of text, image and film narrative they created testi­ fies to the team’s deep understanding of the region’s culture and economic situa­ tion – and to the power of dedicated, intercultural journalism. (See p. 22)
4 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
“Energy and efficiency are the recurring themes in my work,” explains Hamburg­based illustrator
Jochen Stuhrmann, despite originally specializing in children’s books and fairy tales. Whether he is
illustrating the growth of early land plants in Devonian times, drawing human muscle tissue or visualizing the first hours after the Big Bang, there is a palpable
underlying stream of energy – and efficiency, in turn, is the key factor for evolutionary success. No surprise then that Stuhrmann was excited about the potential and efficiency of tidal energy. It just might be a scientif­ ic fairy tale with a happy ending in store. (See p. 56)
The lunar, barren landscape of the Sonora hills, where Siemens built two combined cycle power plants for Grupo Mexico’s huge mining enterprises in La Caridad and Buenavista, did not fail to impress Austro­
Mexican director Michael Vetter (right), Living Energy correspondent
Chris Kraul (left) and Brazilian photographer and New York Times
contributor Adriana Zehbrauskas. When Vetter called it a wrap, one
evening after sunset at the campfire, you could feel that the team had truly managed to capture the magic spirit of the desert and its people, the enigmatic Yaqui Indians, while shining a light on how mining and electricity bring economic opportunities to the region. (See p. 40)
Award-winning features writer Rhea Wessel experienced sudden vertigo as she climbed high above the turbine at the combined cycle plant in Mainz, Germany, where Kraftwerke
Mainz Wiesbaden AG (KMW) plan to install the world’s first system that will keep a plant in hot­start conditions after overnight standstill by reusing steam. Together with the op­ erators she later toured the waste­burning facility and shared a few laughs about the amazing objects that land in a waste facility to be later used to produce electricity: a bridal veil, broken furniture, and mattresses galore. (See p. 64)
When veteran foreign correspondent Garry Barker (center) re­ turned to his native town of Christchurch to team up with award­ winning photographer Guy Frederick (left) and acclaimed doc­ umentary filmmaker and chronicler of the devastating 2011 earthquakes’ aftermath Gerard Smyth they had a lot to talk about. Seeing his hometown still largely in ruins, three years
after the fatal quakes, made a deep impression on Barker – and turned into a key element of the story. As the crew researched the HVDC Pole 3 project in Wellington in the following days, they discovered that the core challenge of the transmission line that connects both islands was indeed earthquake resilience – a topic at which they had become experts by necessity. (See p. 76)
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 5

22 Decentralized power generation in Thailand 76 New Zealand’s HVDC Inter-Island link upgrade
56 Harnessing the power of the ocean
6 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
50 GIL tunnel for legendary German brewery
8
A meeting of minds between Robert Schlögl and Michael Weinhold on the future of energy.
Cogeneration Plants
22
Decentralized generation powers Thailand’s economy,
including the frozen food industry.
Column
34
The electronics revolution provides brains and brawn for the energy system.
Work Safety
70
The Wind Service Training Center in Orlando, Florida, prepares technicians for safe turbine maintenance.
Power Transmission
72
Karlheinz Springer, CEO of Siemens Energy Power Transmission, says DC is putting electricity in the fast lane.
OT/IT Integration
36
OMNETRIC Group is developing solutions for complex grid management using IT and operations technology (OT).
Reportage
76
New Zealand’s HVDC Inter-Island link is strengthened by a new Pole 3 that meets the highest seismic standards.
Power for Mining
40
Latin America’s largest user-owned electric power plant helps Grupo Mexico cut electricity costs in Sonora state.
Essay
88
Nigerian Energy Minister Chinedu Nebo on the outlook for his country’s liberalized energy sector.
Gas-Insulated Line
50
A GIL tunnel gives Munich’s Paulaner brewery optimal use of the building site for its new facility.
100
Tenth anniversary: Looking back at ten issues of
Living Energy.
3 Editorial | 4 Contributors | 94 Directory, Imprint |
95 In Short | 102 Spotlight | 103 Trade Shows and Conferences Ocean Power
56
Marine Current Turbines is testing its new power train that can be used for novel ocean power applications.
Flex-Power Services
64
A steam reuse concept at German utility KMW will
maintain hot-start capability for fast restart.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 7

8 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Wind Service Training Center – EHS, Work Safety
205 0
Wind Service Training Center – EHS, Work Safety
Text: Marc Engelhardt Photos: Urban Zintel
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 9

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Michael Weinhold
10 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Robert Schlögl
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 11

Energy Scenario 2050 Energy Scenario 2050
T he future holds many secrets, but the fact that finding new ways of producing, storing, and distributing energy will be key for global development isn’t one of them.
In fact, listening to Robert Schlögl, a renowned professor of chemistry and the Director of the Max Planck
Institute for Chemical Energy Con­ version, and Michael Weinhold, a seasoned electrical engineer and
Chief Technology Officer of Siemens
Energy, you get the feeling that the future lies bare to those who can read it.
Background
Robert Schlögl heads the Fritz Haber Institute and is founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion. He also coordinates the Future Energy Systems Initiative (see box text page 21), which is jointly run by Germany’s academies of science.
Education
Schlögl studied chemistry in Munich and, after postdoctoral stays in
Cambridge and Basel, habilitated in Berlin. His main focus is on the combination of scientific and technical applications as well as nanochemically
optimized materials for energy storage.
Robert Schlögl
Take energy sources in 2050. “With renewables, we will see wind
power and photovoltaics being constructed on a massive scale in the upcoming decades, with wind power being the most cost­effective option,” says Weinhold. “The cost of generating wind power has already plummeted considerably due to tech­ nical innovation, as in direct­drive generators and special blades de­ signed to use even low wind speeds for power generation.” More efficiency and thus higher economic margins for wind power producers will further boost the sector, Weinhold expects:
“For 2050, we expect a levelized cost of less than 3 euro cents per kilowatt­ hour of onshore electricity generat­ ed.” But that doesn’t mean that more traditional forms of energy produc­ tion will cease to exist. “Don’t forget that for some production processes, like steel manufacturing, you need energy in the form of heat,” says
Schlögl. “In an industrialized country like Germany, that accounts for a significant share of the total energy use. And this sector is critical, be­ cause without it, you don’t have any manufacturing capacity in the mod­ ern sense.”
So even in the 2050s, there will be room for high-efficiency combined cycle gas turbine, or CCGT, power plants. “Gas turbines being installed today have efficiency ratios of over
60 percent and very low CO
2
emissions, and these ratios will be further en­ hanced,” Weinhold states. “These tur­ bines are designed for flexible and partial load use, which will be more and more important in the future – also in connection with the use of hy­ drogen, which will play an important role because of its virtually endless storage capabilities.” Even “clean” coal, purified of exhaust gases and CO
2
, will continue to play an important role in power generation, according to Schlögl.
“Modern soft coal power plants are al­ ready equipped to run with more flex­ ible firing temperatures and the like.”
Exactly how important coal will be in
12 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Research meets industry: Robert Schlögl, a professor of chemistry, and veteran power engineer Michael Weinhold work together in the Future Energy Systems Initiative.
the 2050s will depend mainly on where it’s being used. “Coal is evenly dis­ tributed around the world, and the proven reserves will last for more than 170 years,” Weinhold knows. In emerging economies like India and
China, coal will be used far into the second half of the century. “In Europe, on the other hand, I don’t expect much coal to be used moving towards 2050.”
Renewables, hydropower, and even the efficient use of gas will be much cheaper then, and there are environ­ mental regulations to be considered as well.
Diversity, flexibility, and efficiency – those are three keywords that
describe the future of energy as u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 13

Good chemistry:
Robert Schlögl and
Michael Weinhold met at the Max
Planck Institute for
Chemical Energy
Conversion in
Mülheim a.d. Ruhr,
Germany.
Energy Scenario 2050
Schlögl and Weinhold see it. With an ever­higher share of renewables in the global energy mix, and with ever more consumers becoming energy producers as well, the issue of ener­ gy carriers has become as important as the energy sources themselves.
How can consumers and industry be reliably supplied with all the energy they need? Michael Weinhold thinks there is only one way. “In 2050, elec­ trical power will be the one power source for the consumer. Even heat supply, which in a country like
Germany counts for a third of the to­ tal energy consumption, will come from the socket. When we look at housing estates currently being built, we can see that less and less of them are even connected to gas supply lines, but rather to a power line only.”
Weinhold believes that a real pioneering age of electrotechnology has begun: “No other power source is as flexible as electricity. It can be used for almost everything, it can be produced in a wide variety of ways, and it can also be perfectly transmit­ ted.” In China, for example, huge amounts of energy are generated in­ land and then transferred to the heavily industrialized coastal regions via huge electricity highways. “In the area of Shanghai with its 200 million inhabitants, you have high­voltage power lines that transport gigawatts of energy,” Weinhold notes. “The
Chinese have even invested heavily in ultra­high voltage power lines,
because it gives you a further boost in efficiency.”
Those super energy highways use
direct­current (DC) rather than alter­ nating­current voltage (AC) lines.
And if you ask Weinhold, he is con­ vinced that not only point­to­point energy supply, but even grids will use DC in the future, “because you only need half the corridor to trans­ port a certain amount of energy compared to AC, and you have less transfer losses as well.” Technically,
DC supergrids would pose no major problem, Weinhold says, as the nec­
Background
Michael Weinhold is the Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Energy and a member of the Siemens Sustainability Board. In 1997, he was honored as
“Siemens Inventor of the Year.” Weinhold is one of Siemens’ Top Innovators and has been one of the company’s Senior Principal Key Experts since 2006.
Education
Weinhold studied electrical engineering at Ruhr University Bochum and at the Purdue University in West Lafayette (USA).
Michael Weinhold essary capacity for data processing, and the major components required are already available today.
With the new energy mix, the need for storage will rise further.
In fact, in some regions, oversupply of energy is already reaching record heights. “We have excellent tech­ niques for transforming material
energy sources into electricity,”
Schlögl says. “But the reverse is much more complicated, and that is due to some basic scientific problems we haven’t solved yet.” While power can be stored in pumped storage power plants, in form of heated water, or u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 15

Future Energy Systems
At the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, scientists aim to find ways of converting energy into chemical compounds for better storage and usage. in batteries, none of these solve the problem that comes with the boom in renewables: the need to store
ever­changing amounts of energy, and huge amounts, for that matter.
The solution Schlögl and his team of 200 scientists are working on sounds simple enough: “If we could transform water molecules into
hydrogen, we would have created a very powerful fuel that could store endless amounts of energy.” To split water molecules, energy is needed.
“Nuclear fusion would be the most efficient way to do that: We’d use the energy provided to transform huge amounts of water into hydrogen, while the waste heat would fuel a power plant.” The problem is: Nobody knows whether nuclear fusion – the very process that fuels the sun – is even possible on a large scale. But if it is,
Schlögl expects to know well before
2050. “The Chinese have decided to build their own reactor. They are in­ vesting several billion US dollars
into this technology, and they are
eager to have the reactor up and run­ ning by 2030.”
Should nuclear fusion fail, there would still be other options. One that is already in use is electrolysis.
“Next year, we will be installing an electrolyzer system with a capacity of 6 megawatts for a client who will use it to make his grid more flexible,” explains Weinhold. The electrolyzer uses electrodes made of precious metals to split the water molecule.
It’s an approved technique used in labs all around the world, and Schlögl himself says: “It works, otherwise
Siemens wouldn’t sell it.” However,
Schlögl doubts that electrolyzers are scalable up to the size that would be needed to generate hydrogen in large enough quantities to supply the power required by cities or even whole countries. “It’s one of those cases where research and industry are working on different aspects of the same technology,” Weinhold
admits. “Basic research is needed, but at the same time we do practical research in our labs, both to the same end.”
The appeal of hydrogen is its trans­ formability. “You can transform
energy into hydrogen and then burn it again in a power plant,” Weinhold points out. “However, from the point of efficiency, it’s by far not the best solution – in the end, you might have
16 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Energy Scenario 2050
Robert Schlögl lost more than half of the initial
energy.” That’s where Schlögl and his chemists come in, again. Because once water has been transformed into hydrogen, it can be used to create other chemicals.
“It’s like a solar refinery: You can use hydrogen in chemical processes similarly to oil, only that the source of the hydro­ gen in that case is not fossil, but re­ newable.” And it doesn’t end there.
“For example, we can introduce CO
2 into the equation and thus produce methanol from water, CO
2
, and elec­ tricity. Methanol is a basis for a re­ newable diesel fuel. Depending on the amount of excess energy avail­ able, you can fuel truck fleets in a whole country with methanol instead of diesel.” In the process, one could eliminate huge amounts of green­ house gas in a model example of car­ bon capture and use.
There are even more possibilities, such as the production of polymers.
Methanol could also serve as an en­ ergy carrier; if solar energy were col­ lected in Greece, it could be trans­ formed into methanol and brought to northern Europe by ship in the same way oil is transported today.
“You could even use the existing in­ frastructure,” Schlögl beams. These concepts, as futuristic as they may sound, might turn out to be essential to the world’s energy future. “This interface between electricity and u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 17

Energy Scenario 2050 chemistry could be the link we need to create a closed system,” Weinhold believes. While hydrogen offers huge potentials, it is not the only way to deal with excess energy. When it comes to storage, Schlögl likes to tell the story that energy can even be stored in a stone. “If you heat it up, you can store energy in that way, especially if you need it for heat generation – you just have to make sure that the stone isn’t ripped apart in the process.”
Engineers like Weinhold believe that smart grids will shape the
future of energy as well. “If you can access and process all the necessary data, you can steer whole energy sys­ tems by regulating consumer or in­ dustry demand. Incentive programs are already in place to encourage flexible industrial loads.” Weinhold also argues in favor of storage solu­ tions that are integrated into the grids, in order to strengthen whole energy systems rather than single
entities. “If you have a million house­ holds with photovoltaic systems, there is no point in installing bat­ teries in every single one of them.
What you need instead is a grid­ based energy storage station inside the system, so that energy can be stored and accessed centrally.”
Information technology has enabled engineers to design grids on a scale not thought possible only a decade ago, so Weinhold’s expectations for 2050 are huge.
“With proper clustering of generation and loads, we can already simulate the whole European grid in real time, which we currently do to develop a kind of autopilot for smart grids.
Computing capacity and speed are so much higher than they used to be, and they will develop further. I am convinced that with more and more sensors placed along the entire ener­ gy conversion chain and by applying predictive analytics, for example, we will speed up all of the developments we talked about. Things will certain­ ly happen quicker than we think.”
We don’t know what the energy system will look like 40 years from now, but we do know that with its innovative strength and technical advances,
Siemens will help shape an energy system that is reliable, economical, and in line with the needs of the population.
Using mainly wind power, proton exchange membrane electrolysis systems
(scalable from a few kilowatts to over
) produce hydrogen, which is used in the chemical industry, as a car fuel, and can be stored to
through reconversion in combined cycle power plants.
Offshore wind turbines reliably generate large amounts of electricity; onshore wind turbines have become the price-cutters. With rotor diameters of up to
and capacities of 3 to 5 megawatts, these wind power plants produce electricity
than coal-fired power plants.
Flexible CCPPs not only achieve an extremely high efficiency rate of up to
when fueled with hydrogen, they also realize an overall
efficiency of up to
in cogeneration operation.
HVDC supergrids are the
of the energy system. With numerous node connections to AC grids, they supply power to distributed networks. Based on
these form independent units within the overall system.
Innovative industrial solutions and building technologies enable
in businesses and private households. In self-sufficient industrial plants, data management systems coordinate large-scale power plants, virtual power plants, variable loads, load management, and flexible storage capacity. siemens.com/future-of-energy-2050
18 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
“There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.” As the coordinator for the Future Energy Systems Initiative, Robert Schlögl must bring together 50 top-level experts discussing all aspects of a future energy system.
Neither Weinhold nor Schlögl believe in a one­size­fits­all solution. They are aware that there is not only one, but many futures for the world’s
energy supply. “But innovation is global,” says Weinhold. “Scientific findings are instantly in the global domain, and some countries benefit immensely from that kind of collec­ tive progress.” None more so than
China. “China is diversifying in all directions: They are investing heavily in renewables, in nuclear fusion, but
also in power lines and electromobil­ ity. They do everything, and they do it all on a massive scale.” More efficiency is key in Russia, a country with mas­ sive reserves in fossil fuels.
Then there is the USA, an example for how fast things can change. “Five u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 19

20 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Energy Scenario 2050 years ago, they were building termi­ nals for the import of liquefied natu­ ral gas – then came shale gas, and now those very same terminals are being refurbished for export,”
Weinhold smiles. And while Schlögl thinks that the boom in shale gas will not solve the USA’s energy prob­ lems in the long run – he points to ancient grid structures and outdated power plants – he thinks that there is a lesson to be learned.
“If you are planning a reform of your energy sector anywhere in the world,
never promote a single technology without an exit scenario. There can always be unforeseen changes of
circumstance, a new technology even that we don’t know about yet.”
It’s lessons like these that are shared in the Future Energy Systems Initia­ tive, jointly run by Germany’s acade­ mies of science (see the info box on the right). For the first time ever, sci­ entists of all trades including chem­ ists, engineers, sociologists, legal experts, and economists come togeth­ er to discuss all aspects of the future of energy. “There are at least three layers that have to be brought togeth­ er,” says Schlögl, who coordinates the project. “There’s the technological side of things, including the question of resources; there are questions concerning law and economic feasi­ bility; and then, last but not least, there’s the social aspect: in a nut­ shell, the user.”
It is easy to imagine the potential for controversy, but Schlögl focuses
instead on the common ground.
“A systemic approach is key for a sus­ tainable energy future,” he says.
“Systemic thinking is one of the hard­ est tasks there are. It is really hard to understand that if you fix a problem on one side, you might create a new one on the other. But being aware of these connections is essential.”
Weinhold readily agrees. “To take an everyday example: If I spend the whole day working on complicated turbine designs in order to generate better efficiency ratios in a power plant, and then, on my way home, I spot some consumer electronics that
It’s something that hasn’t been done before anywhere in the world: 50 toplevel experts discussing all aspects of a future energy system. Physicists and engineers, sociologists and chemists, legal scholars and economists discuss the complex challenges involved. The outcomes form the scientific basis for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s Energy Transition
Forum, a platform for dialog with decision makers.
Though the eight working groups focus on the energy transition in Germany, or
“Energiewende,” the discussions and outcomes are also relevant for a global audience, coordinator Robert Schlögl believes. “You can’t copy and paste the German way of energy transition into other countries, because the situation varies so much around the globe. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has to make the same mistakes – others can profit from the experience we’ve gathered.”
The initiative is conducted under the leadership of acatech (the German Academy of Engineering), the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the
Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Siemens Energy
CTO Michael Weinhold is one of the few involved actors from the private sector.
Robert Schlögl are as inefficient as you could possi­ bly imagine – that makes a lot of our efforts obsolete.” However, neither
Schlögl nor Weinhold are planning to give up any time soon. “Engineers must keep on dreaming and having visions,” is Weinhold’s advice. “And the times of singular discoveries are long over. Ours is the age of team­ work, where solutions are found to­ gether in an interdisciplinary way.” p
Marc Engelhardt reports from Geneva on the
UN and international organizations for various media, including the Berliner Zeitung and Neue
Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 21

22 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Text: Clark Shimazu Photos: Hans Sautter
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 23

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cogeneration Plants
O ver the past two decades, the
Amata industrial zones in Thai­ land have served as the model for the country’s industrial transfor­ mation from exporter of raw materials and food products into world­class supplier of machinery, consumer elec­ tronics and high­tech components.
The rapid modernization is based on a single factor: natural gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand. The discovery of high­quality methane under the sea­ bed in the late 1970s led to the opening of new gas­fired power plants, a trend that continues to this day.
The latest is the Amata B.Grimm facili­ ty in the Amata City Industrial Estate in Rayong, some 150 kilometers south­ east of the capital Bangkok. Here, two combined cycle cogeneration power
Cherdchai Yiwlek, Engineer, Amata B.Grimm
plants, equipped with four Siemens gas turbines, sparkle in the tropical sunlight. A first impression of the
labyrinth of tubes, steel towers and steam­spewing safety valves is of vast metalwork as iconic as a Baroque­era pipe organ, even if the music is a
cacophony of buzzing, rattling and clanging. At the center of this temple to progress stands Cherdchai Yiwlek, the engineer who supervised the con­ struction of three Siemens­equipped plants for Amata B.Grimm.
Standing tall, engineer Cherdchai points at a pipe that emerges from be­ neath the ground. “This is where the gas comes into our plant.” Just meters behind him, the water that surrounds gas shipments is drained, and then the methane branches out into feeder lines for the two combined cycle cogenera­ tion plants, which each contain a pair of Siemens SGT­800 gas turbines with
50 megawatts output, and one SST­400 steam turbine.
“The exhaust heat from the gas tur­ bine is routed into a heat recovery steam generator unit to use the ther­ mal energy for steam production to rotate an SST­400 steam turbine, which adds another 40 megawatts of electri­ cal power to our output. Finally, the leftover steam is sent down a fat pipe to a nearby factory.” The heat is used to melt and mold material for indus­ trial products. “We don’t have waste heat here,” Cherdchai exclaims. “For us, steam is money.”
The reuse of heat exhaust from a gas turbine, which otherwise would be lost up a chimney, is the basis for cogene­ ration. Using steam generated by the hot­gas turbine exhaust gases to heat buildings is becoming more prevalent across the cold climes of Europe and
North America. Tropical Asia has yet to take the next leap of logic of using en­ ergy from “waste” heat to run indoor air coolers, which is technically feasi­ ble with existing technology.
Cogeneration boosts fuel efficiency, the foremost priority on Cherdchai’s mental list. This is because the price of gas is rising faster than electricity tariffs, putting profit margins under pressure.
24 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Water drips from the ice blocks produced at the ice factory in Rayong, one of the businesses supplied with energy from the Amata B.Grimm facility.
“The smaller and highly efficient
Siemens turbines, installed in paral­ lel units, enable us to shut down one set during off­peak hours, reduc­ ing losses,” he explains. “The other benefit is that we can scale up power output from other units whenever the grid suffers a blackout so that our customers’ factories can continue without outage.”
“Siemens turbines also have the best performance in reducing NO
X
(nitro­ gen oxide) emissions – lower than government regulations and even less than our own, stricter targets,” he adds. “This is important for obtaining regulatory approval for new power plants, because many communities are concerned about the impact of air pollution on health.”
As is the case with most privately held small power producers, Amata
B.Grimm Power usually operates in­ side an industrial park in need of on­ site energy supply. Being close to the end user cuts long­distance trans­ mission losses. Cherdchai adds that surplus power can be sold under con­ tract to the national grid distributor
Electricity Generating Authority of
Thailand (EGAT). Most of that power remains inside the booming export­ oriented economy of Rayong province, southeast of Bangkok.
Preeyanart Soontornwata, President of the Amata B.Grimm Power Group, the leading small power producer in Thai­ land, is exceptional for an executive in u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 25

Cogeneration Plants
Four SGT-800 gas turbines and two SST-400 steam turbines at the new combined cycle power plant in Rayong’s
Amata City Industrial Estate create power for regional economic development.
Preeyanart Soontornwata,
President, Amata B.Grimm Power Group
26 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Cogeneration Plants the energy industry. Unlike most of her male counterparts, she is not an engineer or geologist but a financial expert, with an MBA in finance from top­ranked Chulalongkorn University.
Rising to the top from her position as chief financial officer, her priorities are centered on fiscal soundness, detailed research and team building, which are all vital during this phase of rapid growth for the private­run small power producer sector.
“Whenever we invest in a new project, our team studies every aspect in deep
detail. Our major concerns are efficien­ cy and the environment, which are de­ cisive for revenues and our customers as well as for gaining regulatory ap­ proval for a new plant,” she explains.
“Our choice has been the 50­megawatt version of the Siemens SGT­800 for overall quality and greatest efficiency.”
Under her helm, Amata B.Grimm has
16 power plants on the registry, 6 of them already operating and 4 under construction. She has no intention of slowing down. “Over the next five years, our combined output is targeted to u
B.Grimm was founded in 1878 as Bangkok’s first pharmacy by Bernard Grimm and his associate, Erwin Müller, and quickly took on every challenge thrown its way – from importing earthmovers to operating a telegraph system supplied by a
company called Siemens. With the royal support of modernizing ruler Rama V, B.Grimm enjoyed fortuitous beginnings, and is today not only the longest-running German business, but also the oldest private company in Thailand.
After the halcyon days of old Siam, things haven’t been so easy, says Harald Link, CEO of the present-day B.Grimm Group.
“My grandfather Adolf Link, a pharmacist from Lübeck, came to Bangkok in 1903 to join B.Grimm.” He famously imported telephone equipment and arranged the first call between Thai-
land and Germany. The outbreak of World War I, however, saw the Link family detained in a prison camp in India. Still believing in Thailand, Adolf Link returned in 1920 to start over – only to be caught up in the disastrous events of World War II.
After the war the family-owned business slowly reemerged and on a visit to Thailand in 1978, a century after the founding of
B.Grimm, grandson Harald discovered for himself t he magic of
this tropical realm. At the time the Thai economy was lifting off on a continuous growth curve. The company’s greatest works have since included the construction of the Bangkok SkyTrain
system (BTS), together with Siemens, and the Metro (MRT).
Harald Link, CEO B.Grimm Group
In the late 1990s, the company formed its Amata B.Grimm
Power Group. “The first power plant was difficult because we built it during the worst year of the Asian financial crisis, 1998,” recalls Link. B.Grimm has since diversified into air-conditioning
and refrigeration systems, as well as transportation, healthcare and infrastructural projects. On a lesser scale, B.Grimm also entered a joint venture to assemble the ubiquitous tuk-tuks,
the three-wheeler taxis that symbolize Thailand. Tourists and locals may not realize it, but the bustling Bangkok they know has been and remains a work in progress of B.Grimm.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 27

The power produced from fire and steam in the cogeneration plant is used at the ice factory in Rayong to freeze water. The large blocks of ice are crushed and transported to the port to cool seafood, preparing it for export.

Cogeneration Plants
Engineer Cherdchai Yiwlek supervised the construction of the plant.
His prime concern: fuel efficiency.
The SGT-800 gas turbine is the centerpiece of the power plant, ensuring highest efficiency and lower emissions.
rise from 2,000 to 5,000 megawatts,” she discloses. “Some of that increase will be based in neighboring countries, a trend being pushed by the ASEAN group’s plan for a new Asian Economic
Community that launches on January
1, 2015.”
Above all, Preeyanart is renowned for her financial wizardry. In 2013, Amata
B.Grimm Power issued an infrastruc­ ture fund on the Bangkok stock ex­ change, structured much like a corpo­ rate bond, which enabled investors to invest in a specific power plant in
return for dividends. The innovative fundraising method, only the second of its type after the fund for construc­ tion of the Bangkok SkyTrain system, eliminates the higher financing cost of private equity. After the first was over­ subscribed by local investors, B.Grimm now has the confidence to push ahead boldly with its plant expansion drive.
Energy expert Praipol Koomsup watch­ es female workers gracefully gliding gigantic blocks of ice onto a truck, as if their task were a Winter Olympics sport. These translucent monoliths are produced by humming compressors under the floorboards of a huge open factory. “Just one of these family­run ice houses consumes vast amounts of electrical power,” notes the Professor of Energy Economics at the prestigious
Thammasat University. “In tropical societies like Thailand,” he says, “the difference between the modern era and the past can be summarized in one word: ice.”
Across lands that have never seen snow or frost, the cool trio of ice­making, re­ frigeration and air­conditioning – the rarest of luxuries just a generation ago – have since become a basic necessity for nutritious diets, a comfortable exis­ tence and sustained economic growth.
The destination of these oversized cubes is Rayong Lagoon, where
fisher men crush ice to preserve the freshness of their daily catch of squid, mackerel, anchovies and bream. At the teeming harbor with its hundreds of colorful wooden trawlers, gangs of workers unload and sort varieties of fish for different markets, local and foreign. Scoops of crushed ice,
30 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
glittering like diamonds, are tossed on boxes of mackerel aboard a truck headed to a gigantic frozen seafood processing plant at the Amata City In­ dustrial Estate.
“Traditionally, small fry like anchovies were sun­dried and made into fish sauce, which is used in Thai cuisine,”
Praipol explains. “The introduction of ice­making and refrigeration, howev­ er, enabled Thailand to become one of the world’s largest exporters of sea­ food products.” At its peak, seafood comprised about a third of the
nation’s exports, earning the hard currency that funded Thailand’s
industrial growth. Now surpassed by high­value automobiles and electron­ ics, seafood still garners about 8 per­ cent of the nation’s export income.
The catch of the day at Rayong Lagoon is immediately cooled with crushed ice from the nearby factory.
Thailand
Since
, Siemens obtained orders from Thailand for more than
gas turbines. Around
of these turbines have already gone into commercial operation.
The fuel flexibility of the SGT-800 is outstanding: It can operate on gas from the Gulf of Thailand, the low-calorific gas from the Andaman Sea, as well as on diesel, with on-load switchover between fuels.
By combining the
industrial gas turbine – available with ratings of
and
– with the
steam turbine, maximum fuel efficiency is achieved.
The cogeneration process recovers heat exhaust for the steam-driven turbine, and reuses steam power for industrial purposes.
In combined cycle operations the performance of the SGT-800 is best in class for its size. All SGT-800 units are equipped with a DLE combustion system to minimize
X
and
2
emissions.
Higher efficiency and lower emissions are convincing national regulators in
Thailand to approve ever more privately operated small power plants.
In the faint light of dawn, Praipol stands aboard one of the trawlers bobbing on the waves. “About 70 per­ cent of electrical power in Thailand is generated by gas­fired plants, which is a huge share compared with most countries.”
“The energy cycle begins here, in the Gulf of Thailand. An undersea pipeline carries the natural gas to the huge gas separation complex on
Rayong Point, where heavier compo­ nents used for plastics and the chemi­ cal industry are extracted, leaving the lighter methane as a fuel for vehi­ cles, cooking stoves and power plants,” he states.
“The separated gas is then moved through an underground pipeline over a distance of 70 kilometers to electricity generators in Amata. The energy flow returns to the coast along high­voltage lines to power the fish­ ing fleets and seafood industry,”
Praipol explains. “A new and larger cycle then begins with the export of products to the global economy. Hard currencies come back in the other
direction, driving Southeast Asia’s rapid development.”
His thoughts on energy and econom­ ics thus take a philosophical turn, in u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 31

Cogeneration Plants
Praipol Koomsup, Professor of Energy Economics,
Thammasat University
Frozen seafood still accounts for 8 percent of Thailand’s exports. The brightly colored fishing boats in Rayong Lagoon leave the port at night, hoping for a good catch.
32 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 a ballet­like pas de deux of sea and land, producer and consumer, heat and cold, yin and yang, fire and ice.
This energy cycle, uniting the regional and the global, knows no boundaries.
Even before next year’s official declara­ tion of a new ASEAN Economic Com­ munity (AEC), a free trade zone of ten member states, Thailand’s energy
sector is already interconnected with its neighbors. Andaman Sea gas ship­ ments and coal­fired electricity arrive from Myanmar, and Thailand is in­ volved in joint oil­and­gas develop­ ment with Malaysia. Thai power plants supply electricity to parts of
Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia.
The regional pact is arriving just in the nick of time for the Thai power
industry. “The gas reserves of the
Gulf of Thailand are not infinite so new
exploration and joint production agreements need to be worked out with Cambodia, Myanmar and
Vietnam,” Praipol warns. “Output here is expected to decline within 10 to
15 years from now. That makes fuel
efficiency more important than ever.”
“The advent of AEC will accelerate
power consumption, due to rising prosperity and industrial growth, so averting energy shortages is an im­ portant priority,” Praipol asserts.
“With all the world’s equipment sup­ pliers and power producers gearing up for the onset of AEC, the winners will be whoever can burn gas with greater efficiency and guarantee per­ formance over a longer lifetime.”
The race is on. p
Thailand-based Clark Shimazu writes about
science and environment issues for the South
China Morning Post, Yazhou Zhoukan magazine and New America Media in San Francisco as well as several online media outlets.
Learn about the cycle of heat and ice in the Rayong region as filmmaker
Disspong Sampattavanich follows energy expert Praipol Koomsup for one day.
siemens.com/living-energy/ fire-and-ice
Living Energy at
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 33

Column Column
Michael Weinhold,
Siemens Energy’s
Chief Technology Officer
What is power? In human interactions, the term often
refers to physical strength, but we also speak of “the power of information” as a way of shaping and directing the course of events. Power is the ability to influence the world in both material and immaterial ways – through
intelligence and muscles, through brains and brawn. The same is true for the way in which electronics has reshaped the energy system.
It was the invention of the transistor and its first commer­ cial usage in the 1950s that kicked off the electronics revolu­ tion. Later, the first integrated circuits and microprocessors hit the market, setting off a rush to build more powerful computers using semiconductors. Information and com­ munication technology (ICT) became a fact of life. At the same time, transistors – used for instance in industrial drives with thyristors – had reached such a high power rating that they began replacing mercury­arc tubes in high­ voltage direct current (HVDC) systems.
The next breakthrough for HVDC technology was the in­ sulated­gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) for very high volt­ ages and currents in the 1990s. We use these to connect offshore wind parks to the grid and in medium­voltage in­ dustrial drives. They are the “muscle” in train drive sys­ tems and can be stacked as compact building blocks in
AC/DC terminals. In 2010, the 75­kilometer/400­megawatt
San Francisco Trans Bay Cable link was the first major
HVDC system to use not only IGBTs, but also a new build­ ing block design allowing for a compact AC/DC terminal footprint. This cutting­edge HVDC topology design was made possible by the high computing power of modern microprocessors required for control and supervision. In the same year, Siemens’ groundbreaking ultra­high volt­ age DC system began pushing 5,000 megawatts across
1,418 kilometers in southern China!
Over 25 years ago, when I was a student of power elec­ tronics and computer architecture, controller boards for industrial drives were still large and unwieldy. We stu­ dents replaced the software routines of these microcon­ trollers to use them as the “brains” of advanced control schemes, once again demonstrating how energy engineers tend to take the best solutions from other domains and integrate them into their own applications in grids or power plants. For such components to function under all conditions requires a lot of domain know­how and re­ dundancy. Systems that use electronics for computing as well as for “muscle” must be designed to meet high expec­ tations. As any engineer knows, you will not be congratu­ lated for the proper operation of a grid; but failure has
severe consequences.
Although ICT and most home appliances rely on electron­ ics, most consumers remain unaware of their huge role.
These components are all around us; but since they are mostly out of sight and inaudible, they remain invisible to all but experts – whether in industrial applications, Inter­ city trains, wind turbines, or in the grid’s transformers and storage devices.
I expect that the future will bring even further increased efficiency in the areas of semiconductor design and con­ verter topologies, where the search is on for new substrates beyond silicon. Also, we will probably see more DC trans­ mission and distribution in the years to come thanks to power electronics.
34 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
From Michael Weinhold’s notebook: Electronics everywhere – although they are all around us, many consumers remain unaware of how crucial power electronic components are for the functioning of society – from grid transmission and industrial applications to home appliances.
In addition to developing control systems, Siemens is
selectively engaged in the development and manufactur­ ing of semiconductors, such as thyristors for HVDC sys­ tems. And of course we apply these components and con­ trol systems, including those developed by ourselves, and engage in joint ventures where we see promising compact or robust technologies. Our size, global presence, and broad expertise allow us to identify such trends at an early stage.
The revolution of power electronics allows us to transmit huge quantities of energy over great distances with high
efficiency, connecting markets and allowing loads to be balanced across multiple climatic and time zones. We are now in the position to build a HVDC supergrid and send re­ newable energy from where it is generated to the industrial centers. Whether such a supergrid will be built is a political decision; but thanks to electronics, our technology has both the brains and the muscle to make it a reality. p
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 35

OT/IT Integration
Text: Roman Elsener Illustration: Karolis Strautniekas
T he increase of renewable gener­ ation, the use of a multitude of energy storage devices and the rise of electric vehicles – the integra­ tion of these different components
into their grids poses a complex chal­ lenge for utility companies. With sig­ nificant investments into the physical infrastructure lined up and the infeed of renewables rising, the business models of utilities are under heavy pressure. In order to stay on top of their game, utilities need a compre­ hensive understanding of the inter­ connected energy landscape as well as the software and IT that link it. The benefits of a successful integration are greater transparency, network
reliability and stability, improved
efficiency and lower operation costs.
OMNETRIC Group, a joint venture of
Siemens and Accenture, embodies the required integrated expertise in
OT and IT, by combining Siemens’ proven engineering know­how with
Accenture’s leading IT expertise. The new agile company will offer expert services and solutions with the mis­ sion to reshape the energy industry for the better. CEO Maikel van Verse­ veld from Accenture and COO Martin
Runge from Siemens talked to Living
Energy about how energy systems will be stabilized thanks to integrat­ ed smart technology solutions – and how the ever­growing amount of available energy data can be used to create value.
“It’s a coming together of two worlds – two companies uniting their core strengths in one new company,” says
Accenture’s Maikel van Verseveld, a
Dutchman who has worked in the util­ ity sector across Europe, Canada and
Asia for over 15 years. “OMNETRIC stands for ‘omni electric’ and ‘omni metric.’ It is about the whole energy system and about creating value for utilities companies, as well as for end consumers,” explains Martin Runge, a manager with a background in both power engineering and business ad­ ministration who started out back in the days of the European market liber­ alization, with the introduction of new
IT systems for generation, retail and distribution. u
36 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 37

OT/IT Integration
Maikel van Verseveld on why Accenture partnered with Siemens
“The way we consume energy is changing dramatically,” Runge says.
“We are not just consuming, we are also generating and feeding in – the energy flow is bidirectional,” he
explains. In order to better match demand and supply in this changed generation landscape, OMNETRIC
Group will help utilities on the one hand to shift demand, as well as on the other hand to analyze and better predict the volatile and fluctuating infeed. For this there are forecasting systems to deal with the change and fluctuation of distributed renewable energy sources. But with a model­ based integration of OT and IT solu­ tions further benefits await down the road: the smooth implementation of smart meter projects, easier billing as well as operational improvements for instance in network control.
“I ran across an article in a main­ stream business magazine stating that the days of the power grid are num­ bered, and that energy will be created and consumed locally,” recalls Maikel van Verseveld. “I believe the real story behind this article is that consumers are looking at energy companies much more closely because of the ris­ ing energy prices. If the regulators, the financing sector, and the end con­ sumer start to scrutinize grid compa­ nies about their business models, they are going to have to get it right if they want to advance and succeed,” says van Verseveld. This, he knows, is done best by looking at the entire energy system with the help of integrated
IT and OT solutions.
“Utility companies have to take hold in the digital world. This integration is imminent and necessary,” van Ver­ seveld stresses. “The longer utilities delay it, the less they will be able to create value based on their invest­ ments. They have to make decisions around investments in the grid, its optimization and the control of the power flow and the fluctuations,” he says and goes on to explain that with the vast quantities of data becoming available from various systems and sensors like smart meters, programs
38 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
OT/IT Integration
Martin Runge on why Siemens chose Accenture as a partner able to predict fluctuations and ener­ gy use should now be a vital part of a company’s capital expenditure plan.
Utilities face the demand that they no longer simply strengthen the grid, but that they also become smarter about it and that also entails answer­ ing business­impacting and invest­ ment­relevant questions in short
delays.
“We want to help increase the quality of supply for the end customer – less complaints and less dissatisfactory moments – as well as the service util­ ity companies can provide: with the proper solution,” says van Verseveld.
The CEO of the new company is very excited about OMNETRIC Group’s po­ tential: “The interest for the services that OMNETRIC Group provides will grow not only in Europe and the USA.
We also want to be relevant for the
Asian and Latin American markets. It could be a few years down the line, but that’s how we see it.”
For now, the headquarters of
OMNETRIC Group will be in Munich, with further European offices in
Amsterdam and Vienna. For North
America, the joint venture company is opening a subsidiary in Minneapo­ lis, where one of Siemens’ develop­ ment centers for grid control is lo­ cated, and in San Francisco, where smart metering, demand response, and virtual power plant products from Siemens are being developed.
OMNETRIC Group will start with
approximately 100 employees, and there will be high entries of new
talent in the future, Maikel van
Verseveld and Martin Runge predict.
“We’re helping utilities to develop new business models reshaping parts of the industry. If we are able to become a globally recognized partner of our clients in five years’ time, we will have succeeded. The goal is to be a trusted discussion and innovation partner for utilities to transition the market of the energy systems,” says Maikel van Verseveld. p
Roman Elsener is the US correspondent for the
Swiss News Agency SDA and has produced work for various European magazines, TV and radio stations. He is based in New York.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 39

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
40 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Power for Mining
Text: Chris Kraul Photos: Adriana Zehbrauskas, Chris Kraul, Michael Vetter
W ith a smile and a twinkle in his eye, Vidal Muhech Dip welcomes visitors to his cor­ ner office in Grupo Mexico’s head­ quarters building in Mexico City’s swank Polanco district. Muhech, who is General Director of Engineering and Construction at the world’s fifth­ largest copper miner, is an engaging raconteur and speaks with a firm grasp of details, especially when the conversation turns to the cost factors that make all the difference in the commodity business of mining.
An engineering graduate of the Na­ tional Autonomous University of
Mexico, Muhech has seen boom­and­ bust cycles come and go over a 45­year career at Grupo Mexico. But today’s interview and its focus on the turn­ key US$580 million electric power plant that Siemens has been building for his company near its La Caridad copper mine in northern Mexico has him especially animated.
His enthusiasm stems in no small part from the 40 percent cost savings in electricity that the combined cycle,
500­megawatt plant will deliver once fully operational. The facility near
Nacozari in northwestern Sonora state will be the largest end user­ owned electric power plant in Mexico and provide Grupo Mexico with a crucial competitive advantage in the global copper market.
u
Ing. Vidal Muhech Dip, General Director of
Engineering and Construction for Grupo Mexico, has been with the company since 1969.
Vidal Muhech Dip
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 41

Power for Mining
Living Energy: Grupo Mexico is making a substantial investment in the new electric power plant at La Caridad. What is its strategic importance for the company?
Vidal Muhech Dip: Mining is an energy-intensive business and we thought we could take advantage of the closeness of Nacozari to the United States, which these days has the cheapest natural gas in the world. Using Siemens’ combined cycle technology, we thought we could generate our own electricity at a much lower cost than what is available through the national power utility.
Now, with half of the plant finished and delivering 250 megawatts, and with the other half in a testing phase, I can say that we are highly satisfied. Once it’s complete, we
expect the power plant will allow us to reduce the cost of producing a pound of copper to 89 cents from the previous 93 cents, which is a big cost advantage.
LE: Why is the power plant’s location in northern Sonora state a key factor?
VMD: The closeness to the La Caridad mine and also to our Buenavista de Cobre mine in Cananea, which is also in Sonora state, means lower transmission costs. The size of the investment in the power plant built with Siemens technology is relatively common for Grupo Mexico. But it will allow for expansion. For example, we are investing a total US$3.2 billion in the expansion of the Buenavista mine in the coming years.
The high-voltage switchyard at La Caridad I and II, from where the power flows to the nearby mines.
Luis Felipe Garrido, La Caridad plant manager for Grupo Mexico
42 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Power for Mining
Recently, Living Energy visited the new
Grupo Mexico electric power plant built by Siemens at the La Caridad mine site as workers there were put­ ting finishing touches on the second of two combined cycle power genera­ tion systems. “Once fully operational in May, the plant will make the world’s lowest­cost copper producer even more efficient,” says Luis Felipe
Garrido, the Grupo Mexico project manager who is overseeing the new power plant’s integration into the mining complex.
“Mexican law passed a decade ago lets companies build power plants for their own use,” says Garrido, adding that the new Siemens facility will enable the company to achieve important economies of scale. The new installation will supply electricity to several mines, not just the smelter that produces copper at La Caridad, but also the Buenavista mine in
Cananea and to a sulfur mine and a lime plant near Agua Prieta.
Garrido adds that the power plant fits into Grupo Mexico’s goal of be­ ing an environmentally friendly miner. As a combined cycle plant, the installation produces about two thirds of its electricity from a tur­ bine fueled by natural gas. The rest comes from exhaust heat which then heats water to create vapor that
powers a second steam turbine.
By capturing the heat, 33 percent
additional electricity can be created.
Grupo Mexico’s US$600 million in the power plant is unusual among big companies that are the end users in that most leave it for third parties to finance the power generation fa­ cilities, then simply sign long­term commitments to use the energy.
Grupo Mexico is betting on the eco­ nomics of producing their own ener­ gy and consuming it. Garrido says he doesn’t know of many other com­ panies with that kind of commit­ ment. Back in Mexico City, Ing. Vidal
Muhech Dip explains the strategy
behind such a decision. u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 43

Power for Mining
Mexico
Ore extracted from the mine comes with a
of over
0.30%.
The mining complex contains
9.97
megatonnes of proven and probable reserves of copper.
La Caridad uses state-of-the-art computer monitoring systems at the concentrator, the crushing plant and the flotation circuit to optimize operations. The concentrator has a current
capacity of
tonnes of ore per day.
Mineral Extraction per Year
Copper
125,717 MT
Gold
0.12 MT
Silver
59.26 MT
Molybdenum
9,796 MT
Copper has been mined and smelted in northeastern Sonora for over
. Mining has ushered in the industrial era in this region.
The molybdenum recovery plant has a capacity of
2,000
per day of copper- molybdenum concentrates.
The lime plant has a capacity of
340
of finished product per day.
employees produced
113.7
of copper in 2011.
La Caridad is located in the northeastern hills of Sonora state in
Mexico. The deposit is situated near the crest of the Sierra Juriquipa, about
kilometers southeast of the town of Nacozari.
Retrieved on March 19, 2014, at http://www.gmexico.com/business-lines/scc.php and http://mexicominingreview.com/mines/mine_17.html
44 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
La Caridad mine is located in northeastern Sonora, about 23 kilometers from the town of Nacozari. The complex includes an open-pit mine containing copper, molybdenum, silver and gold.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 45

Power for Mining
Out of the mine, and off to the customers: At the smeltering facility in the Sonora mountains near Nacozari, the red-hot copper is worked into high-quality wire and plates.
46 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Power for Mining
LE: You compete on a global scale against miners in the USA, Chile,
Australia and elsewhere. How do you measure success?
VMD: Mining is a commodities business. There is no difference in the end product as long as quality standards are met. The competition comes in
controlling production costs. Grupo Mexico’s electric power plant built with
Siemens state-of-the-art technology will not just help lower our costs but make expansion at La Caridad and Buenavista more feasible.
LE: Why did you select Siemens to build the power plant?
VMD: We conducted a tender and bids were evaluated on different levels, including the technology part, lowest cost, heat rate, even the impact of free trade agreements. Siemens was selected in part because their turbines are among the most technologically advanced and also because they gave us a turnkey proposal, which was another comfort factor. Our business is in mining. Power generation is not our specialty.
Although rocky and forbidding, the area in which the new Grupo Mexico electricity generation plant built with Siemens technology and
La Caridad mine are situated is one that is rich in indigenous tradition and where discussions of power
often refer to the spiritual variety.
Three “etnias,” or indigenous groups live in and around Nacozari, says
Osvaldo Giron, the power plant’s
human resources manager. He is an
“adopted brother” of the Yaqui com­ munity, which is one of them.
He describes people here as rich not necessarily in possessions, but in their style of life, their philosophy –
“indomitable, unbreakable people,” in his words. The Yaquis were never conquered and were among Pancho
Villa’s toughest soldiers during the
Mexican Revolution. Land and water are sacred to them. For Giron, this reinforces the sense of respect and responsibility that he and his comin­ ers have for natural resources. He explains that people here see mining as God giving up something he made with his own hands in exchange for people’s survival.
Osvaldo Giron is a native Sonoran who rose from humble origins by dint of hard work and study to a top management level job at the mining complex. To count such loyal people with appreciation for the land and its history among Grupo Mexico’s work force is something General Manager
Vidal Muhech Dip is proud of.
u
… is the world’s
-largest copper miner.
… has more than
billion in annual revenue.
… will own Mexico’s and Latin
America’s largest proprie-
tary electric power plant, the new
cogenera-
tion facility at La Caridad mine that Siemens built.
… will save approximately
40
On the current electricity prices.
… oversees the largest copper reserves worldwide. With their fully integrated operations, they are the leader in lowcost production.
… also owns
74
of Ferromex, Mexico’s largest railroad network.
… will invest
billion to double the output of Buenavista de Cobre mine near Cananea, Sonora state.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 47

Power for Mining
LE: The area surrounding the La Caridad mine is barren and arid. It’s hard to believe that such terrain can provide economic benefits.
VMD: Mining has played an important role in Mexico’s economy for 400 years, since Spanish colonial times. And it continues to be important, representing
5 percent of the country’s economic output. Above all, mining is an activity that has given economic development to cities and small towns where there isn’t much of anything else, in places where there are few other sources of work.
LE: Copper prices boomed over the last ten years and then recently started to fall.
What are the macroeconomic reasons for this?
VMD: We are living in a price cycle pushed by huge demand in China and to a lesser
extent India. Lately prices have fallen because demand has fallen, but they will never
return to levels of ten years ago, partly because the cost of producing copper has risen.
Combined power cycle plants La Caridad I and II, side by side in the Sonora hills in Mexico.
48 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Mayra Santos, chemical engineer
Power for Mining
As the main source of employment in northwest Sonora state, mining is a bellwether industry for the region’s economy. The construction of the
Grupo Mexico power plant built by
Siemens and the expansions of exist­ ing mines that it will facilitate are welcome news to local Sonorans since this means the possibility of employ­ ment at a moment of little job growth in the country.
Very happy with her job is Mayra
Santos, a 25­year­old chemical engi­ neer. She says she is not only prac­ ticing what she was trained to do, but
Grupo Mexico supports the commu­ nity and La Caridad is close to her hometown in Nacozari. Santos has a crucial role at the power plant: She monitors levels of contaminants such as silica, iron and phosphates left
after the water filtration process to guard against incrustations in the steam turbine.
Before returning to her spectropho­ tometer, an instrument that detects minute but rogue levels of minerals by their colors, Santos says working at this enormous project makes her proud, as does the fact that she beat out five other job applicants for the position. After all, she lives in a city that is growing fast. In her view,
Grupo Mexico not only generates
View Mexico City-based director Michael Vetter’s film about the two combined cycle plants that power Grupo Mexico’s mines in the mystic Sonora mountains.
work but helps build streets and schools. Its presence means more than jobs. Ing. Vidal Muhech Dip at Grupo Mexico’s headquarters is well aware of this fact and is intent on helping to grow not only the
company, but Mexico’s economy. p
A former foreign correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times, Chris Kraul is a freelance
business, science and technology writer based in Bogotá, Columbia. siemens.com/living-energy/ la-caridad
Living Energy at
LE: What are Grupo Mexico’s challenges ahead and do you see Siemens helping the company achieve its goals?
VMD: Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Congress recently pushed through an energy reform law that not only opens up the Mexican oil and gas industry to foreign investment but also may allow private companies like ours to enter the electricity generation business. There is more liberty for private companies and that’s what we talked to Siemens about. At the same time we are committed to protecting the environment. Pending on the secondary laws, the energy reform presents a growth opportunity in the energy sector, in both, conventional and nonconventional energy sources, such as wind and solar amongst others.
LE: Any other projects on the horizon?
VMD: We intend to keep growing, which our new plant built by Siemens will allow us to do. Our Buenavista mine in Sonora state will expand from 180,000 annual tonnes of copper to 460,000 annual tonnes by the end of 2015. La Caridad mine currently processes 150,000 tonnes of copper per year. All together, the operations of the company in Mexico, the USA and Peru add up to 1,100,000 annual tonnes.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 49

Gas-Insulated Line
50 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Gas-Insulated Line
Text: Christopher Findlay Photos: Detlef Schneider
T he Nockherberg is a Munich
institution in more ways than one. Situated on the ridge ter­ race of a hillside sloping down to the eastern shore of the Isar River, it has long been home to one of the city’s well­established beer halls and its outside garden overlooking the city.
But the Nockherberg also hosts an
annual event of great cultural signifi­ cance that, in terms of Munich beer culture, is second only to the famous
Oktoberfest. And finally, it is the site u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 51

Gas-Insulated Line
Home of good beer since the 1630s: the Paulaner brewery and beer hall on
Munich’s Nockherberg.
of Paulaner, the oldest brewery in Munich that still operates on the grounds where it was founded.
On a quiet sunny afternoon in Janu­ ary, the brewery’s Chief Operating
Officer Stefan Lustig joins us in a wood­paneled room with a cozy tiled stove to talk about the company’s past and future – a future for which the groundwork is currently being laid as Paulaner begins construction of a new brewery outside of the city center, with help from the municipal power utility and Siemens Energy.
The inn is saturated with the smells of hops and malt wafting up from the brewery next door, but it is also steeped in history, as evidenced by the many mementos that decorate the walls. Both celebrities and ordinary patrons are remembered with framed pictures and personalized beer mugs locked away behind the bar, and fad­ ing posters advertise past festivals and beer tastings. The chronicle of
Paulaner is a fascinating one, and the
Gas-Insulated Line origins of the business still make themselves felt in many ways today, says Lustig. He joined Brau Holding
International (BHI), Paulaner’s parent company, in 2010; two years later, he was appointed to Paulaner’s board of directors.
With a doctorate in brewing technol­ ogy from the University of Applied
Sciences at Weihenstephan, he is not only a manager, but a passionate brewer and an accomplished connois­ seur of the fine beers for which Bavaria is justly famous. “Beer is essentially considered a staple food here,” he says; production standards have been in place at least since 1516, when the duke of Bavaria promulgated the “purity law” stating that only water, hops, and malted barley could be used in brew­ ing – “the earliest contribution to food safety,” as Lustig notes.
Of the many specialty beers produced by Munich’s numerous brewers, one of the best­known is Paulaner’s seasonal
“Salvator” doppelbock, a malty beer rich in flavor and high in alcohol con­ tent. Every year in early March, the
Starkbierfest (“strong beer fest”) marks the beginning of Lent; it is also a cele­ bration of some political significance, as local and state leaders are invited to attend the tapping of the first barrel, which is accompanied by the
Derblecken, a comedic performance sending up the assembled dignitaries.
“Salvator” was first brewed by monks of the order of St. Francis of Paula
(hence the name of the brewery) in
1634. According to an old tradition, the sweet doppelbock was tradition­ ally considered to be of sufficient quality if a wooden bench on which it had been poured stuck to a man’s leather breeches as he stood up. For the Italian friars, unaccustomed to the rougher climate north of the Alps, the nutritious beer served as a “liquid bread” that gave them an energy boost for the arduous Lent period without violating rules on fasting.
Energy supply has also been a major factor in Paulaner’s biggest project in recent years: the construction of a new brewery from scratch in a green field on the city’s periphery. Due to the increasing popularity of its pro­ duce, the company decided to shift production from the confines of the
Nockherberg to a plot in Langwied district – outside of the city center, but still within the Munich municipal area. The new site has a number of advantages, including its proximity to the autobahn, but there was also u
Stefan Lustig, COO, Paulaner
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 53

Gas-Insulated Line
Stefan Lustig a real obstacle in place: a 380­kilovolt overhead power line running diago­ nally across the field.
“We had to find a way to keep the power line in place while optimizing our use of the construction site,” says
Lustig, who was closely involved from the start in planning for the new de­ velopment. “I had to dig out some of my old university textbooks on high­ tension electrical engineering, but we finally found a viable solution.” That solution involved the Munich City
Utilities (Stadtwerke München – SWM) and an underground dual gas­insu­ lated line (GIL) supplied by Siemens
Energy.
A 450­meter tunnel now runs under­ neath the entire construction site of the new brewery, which is expected to be completed in 2015. This eliminates several problems at once: The trans­ mission line is encapsulated in alumi­ num tubes and insulated by a mix of 80 percent N
2
and 20 percent SF
6 gas, offering protection from fire
hazards and eliminating electro­ magnetic radiation that could inter­ fere with the sensitive instruments monitoring the production process.
The recently completed GIL consists of two 2,300­megavolt­ampere systems.
It is able to transfer power equivalent to the output of four large generating units, or two to three times as much power as a traditional power line, al­ lowing for a very compact footprint.
One feature in particular was the de­ cisive factor in the choice of supplier:
The GIL tunnel follows a slightly S­ shaped underground course that is adapted to the structural blueprint of the new building. Friedrich Seeger von
Klitzing, manager of the Langwied project, explains the need for this flexible option: “The purpose of this rather unusual curvature in the GIL tunnel is to achieve complete structural independence between the brewery and the tunnel: The tunnel runs exact­ ly in between the pillars that hold up the packaging hall.” A seamlessly welded pipe gives the GIL the neces­ sary elasticity for precise integration with the architect’s plans.
Would it not have been easier to find a different plot of land to build the new facility? Back at the company’s headquarters on the Nockherberg,
Stefan Lustig takes a sip of the tall, foaming Weissbier sitting on the
table in front of him, and explains:
54 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Gas-Insulated Line
“One important factor was that this property came with a building permit for a brewery, so the whole applica­ tion process was vastly accelerated.
But you’ve also got to remember that building space in Munich is limited – even outside of the city center, there aren’t that many open spaces that can accommodate a brewery of this size.”
And there is an important reason why
Paulaner chose to remain within the administrative boundaries of the city of Munich, he adds – one that is inti­ mately linked with the global fame of the world’s beer capital: “The Oktober­ fest is a very important event for us, especially in terms of marketing. And only those breweries that are based within the city limits are allowed to serve their beer at the festival.”
Siemens, working closely with the
SWM municipal utility, was able to build the tunnel within the extremely tight time schedule. “The project was a learning experience for everybody,” says Lustig, “but both during the plan­ ning phase and during construction,
Siemens’ performance was marked by a high degree of reliability. You could tell that the engineers had a real passion for this technology – we really appreciated their excellent work.”
Looking forward, he is optimistic about the company’s prospects. The initial output capacity of the new brewery will be 3.5 million hectoliters per year, or about 25 percent more than the old Paulaner brewery could produce. The brand enjoys a great deal of popularity both in Germany and in over 70 countries, and sales are increasing especially in the USA, in Russia, and throughout Asia. “Beer
embodies the Bavarian convivial
lifestyle,” says Lustig. “By ensuring safe operation of the power line and allowing us to make the best possible use of the property for our new brew­ ery, Siemens has contributed signifi­ cantly to the continuation of that
tradition.” p
Christopher Findlay is a freelance journalist
living in Zurich, Switzerland. He writes on
science and politics.
• Two GIL systems, each with a transmission capacity of
• Operating voltage:
•
tunnel can be upgraded to hold four systems
• Overall single-pole length of GIL tubes:
• Project completed in just
A Bavarian Legend
In 1634, the friars of Saint Francis of
Paola began brewing beer in Munich.
Today, Paulaner is one of Germany’s top ten breweries, with its unfiltered top-fermented wheat beer a market leader. The company has more than
20 microbrewery restaurants around the world and is the top Bavarian beer exporter to key markets such as Italy, the USA, France, and China.
staff members are employed by the brewing company
hectoliters of beer sold in 2013
of beer on offer, including seasonal specialties
Paulaner is available in some
around the globe
By the 19 th century, the former monastery brewery had become a successful enterprise.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 55

Text: Daniel Whitaker Illustration: Jochen Stuhrmann
56 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
SeaGen U: array of submerged devices (28- to 50-meter-deep water). Underwater power train means significantly lower capital expenditures per megawatt installed and reduced cost per kilowatt-hour produced.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 57

Ocean Power Ocean Power
O n a cold day in January, the
North Sea waves, whipped up by a gusty wind, pound hard against the aging dock at Blyth, on
England’s northeastern coast. The bleak weather seems to fit what has befallen the town over the last half century: The shipyards that built the world’s first aircraft carrier, the HMS
Ark Royal, have closed; all three rail­ way stations are now gone; the Bates coal mine is shuttered. And the town’s great coal­fired power station, built during the 1950s and 1960s, the first in the country to have 275­megawatt sets, finally saw its four chimneys
demolished in 2003.
But appearances can deceive, and
Blyth now hosts a thriving new in­ dustry in which it is a world leader.
The activity takes place in a series of giant new industrial buildings that squat mysteriously on and around the very dry dock where the HMS Ark
Royal was built. This is Narec – the
National Renewable Energy Centre.
Here, manufacturers and developers from around the world have their re­ newable electricity generation units tested before they can be placed out in the elements that will drive them.
It’s hard to appreciate just how vital this testing function is. Renewable technologies are at early stages of their development, and testing can catch many problems and identify lessons that will affect the technolo­ gy’s viability before units are finally manufactured. In economic terms, this matters because the initial capi­ tal expenditures and the cost of any repairs and maintenance are the only financial costs associated with renew­ able technology, which uses the natu­ ral elemental forces as free fuels.
Nowhere is testing more important than with ocean power. Matthew
Reed, Engineering Director at Marine
Current Turbines Ltd. (MCT), ex­ plains: “The industry has learned it’s very expensive to build and test a prototype by putting it into the sea.
You need a certain level of maturity before going into the water.” Reed is at Narec to oversee nine months of tests on a new 1­megawatt power train, which will take the power gen­ erated by tidally driven rotors and make it available for transfer into an electricity grid.
Narec CEO Andrew Mill agrees. “Even the smallest fault – say, a problem with a fuse – could cost you a whole season [until repair vessels are able to reach the turbine] if it develops at the wrong time. I’ve seen a mere
sensor fault cost £400,000, as the manufacturer pays to take the unit out of the sea and put it back in again, and that doesn’t include lost generation.” Reed agrees: “Where else is there such a premium on reli­ ability, due to repair costs? Perhaps with space travel.” Mill looks out of the window at the eleven offshore wind turbines sitting in the North
Sea. “Narec is great value,” he con­ cludes. Offshore wind provides about three quarters of the not­for­profit entity’s business, while ocean power accounts for the remainder.
Reed’s company MCT has the world’s most mature, proven tidal stream
asset, a 1.2­megawatt generator at
Strangford Lough in Northern
Ireland, which over five years has generated more than 9 giga watt­ hours. Its lead in tidal stream tech­ nology is why Siemens purchased u
Rotor diameter:
(up to 24 m)
Tip speed:
(up to 14.4 m/s)
Blade pitch capability:
Nominal rated rotor thrust: approx.
Power to the grid: approx.
Rotor speed:
Rated power: Each power train has a rated power of
or
(combined power output of 2 MW per turbine) at a current velocity of
(down to 2.25 m/s)
* site dependent (30% to 60% capacity factor reflected)
** after the main device transformer
58 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
SeaGen S – the advantage of a
surface-piercing device: Easy access keeps operational expenditures under control.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 59

Ocean Power
SeaGen F: a floating tidal current device operating in
28- to 100-meter-deep waters.
the remaining stake in the company in 2012. The power train at Narec shows what the two companies can accomplish together. Successful MCT technology has been enhanced by a new, integrated power train concept from gearbox to power electronics and relating to the grid connection – all from Siemens businesses.
Inside one of Narec’s cavernous build­ ings, the power train is connected to a giant gearbox for testing. Narec is applying its Force Application System
(FAS), the only one of its kind fully commissioned, to simulate the thrust, and oscillating torque of the most extreme possible sea condi­ tions. The FAS allows Narec to carry out what it describes as a highly
accelerated life test, which will deliv­ er the equivalent of 20 years of in­sea life to the power train. There are also a wave tank and two tidal devices, one set to combine with the wave tank to simulate the interaction of wave and tidal forces.
Back in Munich, Achim Wörner, Head of the Siemens Hydro and Ocean
Power Business (E HO), elaborates on how quickly tidal stream technology is now developing. “We now have ro­ tors 20 meters in diameter. They draw on wind technology, but offer greater power efficiency, since water is more than 800 times as dense as air and therefore can generate far more elec­ tricity per equivalent rotor size. The tidal stream power market today is in
60 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Ocean Power a comparable situation to that of off­ shore wind around 15 years ago. In the meantime, offshore wind has grown tremendously.
He also explains why the UK is, quite literally, ideally positioned as a tidal stream power location. The island is home to some great potential sites,
especially on the Scottish and Welsh coasts – including one at Skerries, off the Isle of Anglesey in Wales, where
MCT hopes to establish an array that could range from 10 to 30 megawatts.
The other is governmental support via a “feed­in” tariff, at least until 2019, that favors renewable generation.
Wörner’s colleague Marco Dornauer,
Head of the E HO Technology and In­ novation Department, describes how tidal power turbine design is evolving from MCT’s current SeaGen model, where twin axial rotors are attached to a crossbeam that can be raised up a surface­piercing monopile, allowing siting in 35­meter­deep waters. For projects on a multimegawatt scale, the product road map foresees power trains mounted on single monopiles connected to an offshore platform for power conditioning. To complement the portfolio, floating structures will reduce infrastructural and depth limi­ tations. All solutions use the same qualified power train and therefore al­ low systematic learning and enable economies of scale; hence the focus at
Narec on getting this component right. With the power train, MCT/
Siemens offers a rare example of a sin­ gle company covering all elements from generation to the grid.
MCT and Siemens will be riding the current main trends in tidal power.
The submerged and floating models could be used in arrays exceeding 100 megawatts in power. At the same time, increased scale combined with the rig­ orous pretesting offered by Narec will lower tidal stream levelized costs of energy from the current level of above
30 pence per kilowatt­hour. The great­ er depth capabilities will matter be­ cause, for instance, while Europe’s
tidal potential is concentrated in UK waters, two thirds of that is believed to be at depths of more than 40 meters.
Narec seems similarly to be in tune with current and likely future needs.
MCT’s power train followed a major series of wind power tests for
Samsung. Mill’s understanding of what a world­class testing institution requires comes not only from prior experience in offshore oil and gas, but also from previously heading the
EMEC testing center in Scotland’s
Orkney Islands. “Doing things in the water just makes everything much harder,” he reflects. “With oil and gas, we built great drilling platforms to u
Tidal energy potential
• Global potential of up to 800 TWh (IEA estimate)
• By harvesting this global tidal energy, more than 150 million households could be
supplied with green and sustainable power.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 61

Ocean Power
A fully submerged solution can use lighter parts for
simple installation and operations. Transformer and
converter are anchored separately on the seabed.
62 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Ocean Power
• Today, the fastest-growing technology uses high-velocity tidal streams, usually found in constrained channels around headlands. Can also be used with (nontidal) marine currents, such as the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic.
Main design approaches:
horizontal axis; vertical axis; ducted rotor; hydrofoil.
Precommercial full-scale prototypes of around
are already operating, with the first at the
UK’s Strangford Lough.
Global potential estimate:
per year.
1
• Wave technology is at the testing stage, with part-scale
prototypes of less than
Global potential estimate:
per year.
• Thermal gradient utilizes temperature differences between the sea’s surface and deeper water. At demonstration stage, with small-scale devices of below
Global potential estimate:
per year.
• Salinity gradient makes use of the difference in salt concentration at fresh-water/sea-water interfaces.
At concept stage: pilot devices offering less than
Global potential estimate:
per year.
• Tidal range (barrage) technology:
Incoming tidal water is stored and then released to drive wheels or turbines. Many operating plants already use this mature technology. They date from the 1960s and can
generate over
using either ebb or flood generation. A related, as yet untried variant is dynamic tidal power, featuring long dams out to sea that would create water-level differentials.
Global potential estimate:
per year.
Due to this plethora of technologies, suppliers face challenges in achieving economic scale with standardized components.
However, tidal stream technology – currently the most proven and technologically viable of the alternatives – addresses this relatively well, with a degree of consensus over the use of similar components to wind power (such as axial turbines), where scale is already greater and technology more advanced.
1 Estimates from Siemens. By comparison, total world electricity production is less than 25,000 TWh/year. create effectively an onshore envi­ ronment. But you can’t do that with ocean power, and without testing, it’s impossible to know how technology designed on dry land will perform in so different an environment.”
When I comment on the wintry weather here at Blyth, he laughs and tells me about the Orkney Islands, which experience 20­meter­high waves, winds of 160 kilometers per hour, and tidal streams of up to
5 meters per second. That’s the sort of territory that tidal stream power claims as its own, says Mill: “Tidal and wind involve getting into those parts of the sea that everyone else tries to avoid.”
Matthew Reed certainly has no in­ tention of avoiding the water or the weather. “As soon as the 2,000 hours of Narec testing are completed” – equivalent to surviving 20 years of life in rough seas for MCT’s power train – “our turbine will be ready to deploy.” p
Daniel Whitaker is a London-based freelance journalist who has followed the energy and
environmental sectors for many years. His work has appeared in the Financial Times and The
Economist magazine.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 63

Flex-Power Services Flex-Power Services
Text: Rhea Wessel Photos: Claudius Schulze
64 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 65

Flex-Power Services
Thomas Zimmerer, KMW’s Technical Service I&C Engineer, takes pride in the innovative heating concept.
Thomas Zimmerer,
Technical Service I&C Engineer,
KMW
T he Rhine River was once the northernmost frontier of the
Roman Empire. Today, the mighty body of water transports freight, people, and ideas between the Alps and the North Sea. Along its winding path, the river flows through the industrial heart of the
German city of Mainz, where on its banks a combined cycle power plant is trying something new. While other plant operators struggle in the mar­ ket for fossil fuel power – facing lower demand, lower margins, and a harsh competitive climate due to subsidies for renewable energy –
KMW is meeting the challenges with decisive steps to make its plant
operations more flexible.
As part of those steps, KMW has test­ ed a system that makes use of steam from a nearby waste burning facility to keep components in the power plant warm so that the plant can be started up faster and more frequent­ ly. The system will allow KMW op­ erators to respond quickly when de­ mand for power rises and prices are adequate. Like a few operators else­ where in the world, KMW already makes use of residual steam to gen­ erate electricity. The plant was de­ signed with a larger than usual steam turbine and heat recovery steam gen­ erator, so KMW could use 65 tonnes of steam from the waste burning fa­ cility. The steam is transported to the electricity plant in an overland line that is more than 100 meters long.
KMW’s pilot project using the steam to keep components warm is the first to test the idea of using steam to enable a plant to keep hot­start conditions
66 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Flex-Power Services
Residual steam from this waste burning facility near the KMW plant will soon be used to maintain KMW’s hot-start capability.
after overnight standstill, according to plant operators. Together with
Siemens, KMW has validated the con­ cept. The board is working on plans to improve the initial idea and install a system permanently. In addition,
KMW has applied for a patent for the heating concept.
“We’re the first to pioneer using steam to keep plant components warm for hot starts whenever we want,” says
Thomas Zimmerer, KMW’s Technical
Service I&C Engineer. “Over the past three years, we have defined the pro­ cess and the mechanics of how and where to integrate steam. The next step is to run more tests and analyze results with our operations and busi­ ness experts,” Zimmerer explains.
For Zimmerer and KMW, the concept is more than a question of engineer­ ing. It’s a matter of euros and cents.
“We need to know how much energy will be necessary to keep the steam turbine and the heat recovery steam generator warm. Does it even make sense?” Zimmerer says. Meanwhile,
KMW, which operates a 410­megawatt turnkey plant from Siemens, is im­ plementing a suite of hardware and software improvements that are part of Siemens Flex­Power Services TM .
These include a Hot Start on the Fly adaptation and process optimizations for instrumentation and controls for the plant’s steam turbine. In addi­ tion, KMW is modernizing its soft­ ware operating system by migrating to an advanced one.
The Hot Start on the Fly concept al­ lows a parallel start­up of the steam turbine with the gas turbine. To make it possible, KMW purchased an updated and enhanced version of the steam turbine master sub­ group control (SGC), which will be implemented during 40 days of standstill. This period is needed for
KMW and Siemens to migrate the plant’s instrumentation and control system from the SPPA­T2000 to the newest SPPA­T3000 version. One benefit of the SGC enhancement will be to accelerate hot start­up time by 10 to 15 minutes, which will keep
5,000 to 8,000 cubic meters of gas from being burnt during low­effi­ ciency, part­load operation of the gas turbine. These changes will be implemented in mid­2014, and they are part of a long line of invest­ ments and innovations that KMW has made over the years, says
Zimmerer, who has been a driving force behind the new heat concept for frequent hot starts.
As a midsized company where employ­ ees often work their entire careers,
KMW has a culture that is open to in­ novation, according to Olaf Thun, who leads KMW’s Generation division.
Thun began working at KMW right
after graduating from university, start­ ing as the assistant to the CEO.
Zimmerer has been at KMW for 31 years.
Thun notes: “Fast decisions and short decision paths are the most impor­ tant part of our innovation culture.”
Where larger companies might have entire departments working on dif­ ferent aspects of innovation and effi­ ciency improvement – and hardly speaking with one another about their projects – KMW engineers frequently sit together in the lunchroom bounc­ ing ideas off one another.
Indeed, the design of the newly built lunchroom gives employees a relax­ ing and aesthetic place to take their meals, away from the constant drone of rotating turbines. Over a meal, people talk informally about proj­ ects, without regard to hierarchy or protocol. It was in this type of setting in 2011 that Zimmerer and colleagues first began discussing the idea of us­ ing steam to keep components warm.
KMW had heard about, but had not yet purchased Hot Start on the Fly from Siemens, and it began thinking about how to stay in hot­start mode for a longer time.
Zimmerer remembers: “Though
Siemens has a different concept for keeping the heat recovery steam gen­ erator warm, they were very interest­ ed in our idea and our pilot program.
We worked with Siemens to test our heat reuse concept.” Being able to
extend the range of the Hot Start on the Fly will be even more important as KMW faces yet another change,
Zimmerer notes. Over the next years, a contract that KMW has for purchas­ ing gas will change so that prices are more in line with market prices. At that point, when KMW must pay high­ er gas prices, KMW expects to signifi­ cantly reduce the number of operat­ ing hours and starts per year. “This situation motivated us to optimize u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 67

Flex-Power Services
Operators keep watch in the KMW control room.
SGC optimization will accelerate hot start-up time by 10 to 15 minutes.
The steam reuse concept allows the KMW plant to stay in
hot-start mode for a longer time.
68 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 warm and cold starts and to imple­ ment a faster start­up sequence. We are confident we can reach these targets by maintaining hot start­up capability for more than eight hours with our new heating concept,” ex­ plains Zimmerer.
For Thun, constant innovations and adaptations to improve the plant’s flexibility and efficiency are not only a technical challenge. They’re a nec­ essary part of keeping pace with pow­ er market changes in Germany.
Indeed, says Thun, “Operational and start­up flexibility is something you have to invest in.” In Germany, as part of reforms to support renewables, wind and solar power producers were given a first right to feed electricity into the grid. When wind and solar generation fluctuates, conventional power plants must balance out the grid – the so­called residual load.
“When we built Power Plant Number 3 here, no one would have ever imag­ ined that the plant would not operate at full capacity. Or that it might be started on a daily basis. It was un­ imaginable,” says Thun.
KMW is actively involved in industry associations and dialogs in and around the energy market in Germany. Like others, KMW is looking for a business environment and a policy framework that will allow the plant to cover its costs or make a profit through conven­ tional electricity production. Thun says the CO
2
certificate system, which prices emissions, has harmed KMW’s business because current certificate costs are so low that coal­powered plants have an advantage. That said,
KMW places high value on its innova­ tion culture and the opportunity to cooperate with Siemens as a way to buck the market trends. “Since we’ve agreed with Siemens on how to share responsibility for tests conducted on our plant, we have made our plant available for various prototype tests,”
Thun says.
Florian Roehr, the Product Manager at Siemens for Flex­Power Services TM , explains: “KMW’s willingness to test new ideas and products on short no­ tice makes it a particularly interest­ ing partner.” For instance, just after the KMW plant was commissioned in 2000, KMW upgraded to an A(3) com­ bustion chamber. In 2003, it installed a Hydraulic Clearance Optimization
(HCO), which shifts the rotor towards flow direction to optimize turbine clear­ ances during steady­state operations.
It was the first HCO implemented by
Siemens in the SGT5­4000F fleet.
In the same year, KMW installed Turn
Down and the Compressor Mass Flow
Increase upgrade (also as the first
Siemens customer), and, in 2004 and
2007, burner upgrades. Looking for­ ward, Thun would like to see KMW build another 400­megawatt gas and steam plant and continue with its role as an innovation leader and test center. For instance, Thun envisions more enhancements such as mini­ mized on­site power through smaller pumps in the condensate system and the evacuation system, as well as a fast plant shutdown capability. But the market in Germany is changing so quickly that much of the business is unpredictable. Says Thun: “Since
I never know what will happen after the next election, I think flexible op­ erations are the best way to go.” p
Rhea Wessel is an American freelance writer based near Frankfurt. She writes about finance and technology, and her work has appeared in The New York Times and the Wall Street
Journal.
Olaf Thun, Head of Generation division, KMW
Wiesbaden
In response to new operating profiles with higher flexibility requirements for many fossil power plants, Siemens offers Flex-Power Services TM , incorporating hard- and software solutions as well as studies and plant assessments.
Pe ak
P ow er
&
Lo ad
Gr adi ents
Gr id
Ser vices
Aspects of
Par
E m
Minimum t Load iss ion s
St ar t &
St op w er on
Pe rfo rman ce
Flex-Power
Services TM enance
Fle xibility
&
C oo ld ow
Int erv als n
KMW is improving fast-start capability by maintaining pressure and temperature in the steam generator with superheated steam from a nearby waste burning plant that enters the water-steam cycle of the CCPP. It will flow into the intermediate pressure system directly after shutdown, and later into the high-pressure system when the bypass station is opened. After 20 hours, heat levels will be constant, with a temperature difference between flow in and flow out points in the
intermediate pressure system. A convective heat transfer to the lowpressure system and the economizer is then created. The pressure in the low-pressure system will increase, allowing KMW to maintain the temperature and pressure in the system at the level required for fast starts on a regular basis.
KMW, which has received a patent for the heating concept, says the main benefits of its fast-start innovation will include:
• No hardware modifications necessary in the heat recovery steam
generator and the water-steam cycle so far
• Steam consumption between 2 and 4 tonnes per hour
• Fuel savings at warm starts worth approximately €4,000
• Minimizing lifetime consumption of thick-walled components
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 69

Work Safety
Text: Sameh Fahmy Photos: Thomas Winter
Training towers allow wind turbine technicians to practice rescue
techniques using the same equipment they use in the field.
A man hangs limp on a ladder while just a few yards away an­ other is being pulled from a narrow enclosure under a generator, his back strapped to a board and his neck in a brace. Such scenes are com­ monplace at the new Siemens Wind
Service Training Center in Orlando,
Florida, where wind turbine techni­ cians come from throughout the
Americas for rigorous and realistic safety and technical training. “Even though you work with the equipment every day in the field, you don’t use it in a rescue scenario every day,” says
Alex Freund, a technician based in
Marshalltown, Iowa. “So it’s nice to be refreshed on how to properly use it and to make sure you understand ev­ ery nuance.” Freund and his fellow trainees were practicing rescue tech­ niques for working at heights while nearby another group was standing within the cramped confines of a wind turbine nacelle, where they had just pulled a colleague with a simulated in­ jury from the hub several feet below.
The Wind Service Training Center is a state­of­the­art, 40,000­square­foot facility that opened in September 2013.
Earl Walker, head of training and de­ velopment for Siemens Wind Service
Americas, says every aspect of the fa­ cility was designed to create the best possible learning environment, from the layout of the classrooms to the audiovisual equipment, lighting, and comfort of the chairs. The center combines classroom instruction with hands­on training to ensure that technicians have the skills and expe­ rience to work safely and efficiently.
“Our goal is for them to do exactly what they would do in the field and to prove that they’re doing it right,”
Walker says.
In addition to the 2.3 megawatt wind turbine nacelle that Freund was training in, the center also houses a
3.0 megawatt direct drive wind tur­ bine nacelle and three, 30­foot rescue
70 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Work Safety
The Siemens Wind Service Training Center in Orlando houses two wind turbine nacelles that enable realistic training in operations, maintenance and advanced rescue techniques.
training towers, all of which are lo­ cated indoors allowing technicians to train without disruption from rain, thunderstorms, and extreme heat.
The facility itself is strategically lo­ cated just a few miles from the inter­ national airport in a city that is a
major tourist destination and is per­ haps best known as the home of Walt
Disney World. Orlando also is home to the headquarters of Siemens Ener­ gy and near the geographic midpoint of North and South America. To make accessing the center as convenient as possible, the trainees are shuttled from the airport to the hotel and to the training center, where lunches are catered. While the subjects of the classes vary, they all emphasize the same theme: safety. As Walker puts it, the tech nicians work in what es­ sentially amounts to “a small power plant on a stick.” In addition to work­ ing at heights of roughly 300 feet, they contend with hazards such as rotating machinery and electrical and hydraulic components.
Environmental, health and safety training manager Russell Cook notes that the remote location of many wind farms makes the training that
Siemens offers even more critical.
“Often the guys go out in teams of two to work and are a long way from help, so we are the first responders,” he says. “Every single person has to be able to save the person they’re with.”
In addition to courses that address working at heights and rescues from confined spaces such as hubs and blades, the center also offers technical trainings on turbine operation, main­ tenance and troubleshooting. As with the other classes at the center, these courses blend classroom instruction with practical, hands­on experience with equipment. Perhaps not surpris­ ingly, they also have an overriding
emphasis on safety. “The more you know about a piece of equipment, the more you can recognize the potential dangers that lie within,” says technical training manager Kevin McCarty.
New classes are constantly under de­ velopment, many of which are based on customer feedback. Like the other
Siemens Wind Service Training
Centers in Germany, Denmark, and the
United Kingdom, the Orlando facility is certified by the Global Wind Organi­ zation (GWO). Siemens goes well be­ yond the minimum legal and regula­ tory requirements, however, to emphasize that safety is foremost in everything the organization does.
“I want safety to be so ingrained in our culture that we don’t even think of it as separate from anything we do,”
Walker says. “I want it to be like breathing.”
Such a focus is clear to industry veter­ ans such as Bronson Ellis, energy training coordinator at High Plains
Technology Center in Woodward,
Oklahoma. “I have seen a lot of
trainings,” he says, “and Siemens is head and shoulders ahead of every­ one else.” p
Sameh Fahmy, MS, is an award-winning freelance business and technology journalist based in Athens, Georgia.
More pictures are featured in the
Siemens Publications App for iPad or
Android tablets at
siemens.com/publications-app/en/
Living Energy at
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 71

Power Transmission
Text: Onno Groß Photos: Jann Averwerser
K arlheinz Springer, as Head of the Power Transmission
Division, you work in close proximity to the dynamic energy market. How is the grid architecture affected by the changes in power generation?
Karlheinz Springer: We will see a drastic shift in the global energy mix by 2030. While fossil fuels will remain dominant, renewables will account for one third of future power genera­ tion capacity. Two global trends are evident: first, the spatial decoupling of energy production and energy
consumption. We have more and more remote energy sources like hydro­ power or large offshore and onshore wind farms. And governments are planning to install the power plants close to the energy sources. Thus, huge amounts of energy have to be transported over long distances to the megacities and load centers. At the same time, distributed energy with its intermittent infeed and
reverse load flows presents new challenges for the distribution grid, requiring new smart grid solutions. by 30 to 50 percent in comparison with AC transmission. It paves the way for a very efficient and stable delivery of power.
Because power transmission is needed, tens of billions of euros have to be spent now and in the
future. Where are the key investments to be expected?
K. Springer: Investments in new grid infrastructure must meet three key requirements: Obviously, capacity ad­ ditions should increase the availability of the network. It is equally important that they represent a viable business case for investors. In addition, the lo­ cal population needs to be involved in the planning to ensure public accep­ tance of the line extensions.
If we look at the overall global devel­ opment, there is a growing market for high­voltage DC systems as well as for the modernization of existing
AC grids. More and more, this requires
HVDC technology, where transmission losses of lines are typically reduced
High-voltage power transmission involves interconnector and longdistance lines. What is planned here in the future?
K. Springer: Siemens has been en­ gaged in the DC field for a long time.
This includes high­power transmission systems such as those linking Spain and France across the Pyrenees, or
England and Scotland. There is the general trend for power transmission over long distances and here HVDC is the key instrument. In Europe, we do see an increased number of country interconnections and a continuous growth of wind power generation, es­ pecially in the North Sea and around the UK. In China and India, however, the growing energy demand of the megacities requires even stronger transmission capacities. In China, u
72 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Karlheinz Springer, CEO, Power Transmission Division
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 73

Power Transmission onshore wind energy and hydropower in the north and the west will need bulk power transmission over long distances to the coastal cities. In ab­ solute terms, these investments are certainly always higher than in other countries. We are participating well in this market and are the number­one provider of HVDC in China. Since we built the first 800­kilovolt lines, we have worked closely with the State Grid and Southern Grid Corporations of
China. At present, we are close to build­ ing a 1,100­kilovolt HVDC that will transport the incredible amount of
11,000 megawatts – via a single bipo­ lar system!
The late 19 th century saw the “War of Currents” between AC and DC.
Will we have to rethink the electricity network, and how will this develop?
K. Springer: That historic contest be­ tween Nikola Tesla and George West­ inghouse [promoting AC] and Thomas
Edison [pushing for DC current] was won by the AC advocates because at that time, the usefulness of DC technology over long distances was limited. How­ ever, we have long been observing a development from AC to DC transmis­ sion. It all began with the first DC point­ to­point connections, which Siemens installed in Germany in 1945, and later
Karlheinz Springer
Karlheinz Springer, born in Mannheim,
Germany, in 1959, graduated with a
Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mannheim.
After completing his university studies,
Springer joined Siemens in 1985. His career involved increasing responsibilities across a broad range of functional areas including international project management, engineering and execution, sales and marketing, and commercial management. In May 2012, he was appointed
CEO of the Siemens Energy Power Transmission Division. When he isn’t working from his desk in Erlangen, Germany, his work on DC power transmission often takes him far afield to the USA, Russia, or
China. International issues are constantly on his mind: “Being local is in the DNA of Siemens,” Springer says. “Our motto is:
‘In China for China, and from China to the world.’ This mind-set applies to all our country departments. And I think it is the right strategy in this more and more globalized world.”
74 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Power Transmission around the world. For instance, Siemens connected the power supply networks of New Jersey and New York with a
660­megawatt back­to­back HVDC sys­ tem; we also linked the island of Mal­ lorca with mainland Spain. Right now, we are constructing the world’s first
600­kilovolt DC submarine cable trans­ mission in the Irish Sea. So the num­ ber of long­distance DC transmission systems is constantly increasing.
With the Siemens portfolio of high­ voltage DC solutions, we are perfectly matched to these requirements and have a leading position. We offer the state of the art in technology and will maintain that edge.
How will these new developments affect the future grid architecture?
K. Springer: What we will see is a combination of AC/DC energy high­ ways, or a “supergrid,” as some call it.
This will be very different from what we have known in the last 50 years. It means a mixture of AC and DC sys­ tems, which will enable load flow and voltage. This is where our product development is headed. Our HVDC
PLUS “full bridge” technology, for example, can handle short circuits on the DC transmission effectively. We are the leader in that technology, which is required for the DC connec­ tions in Germany’s grid. We are also developing compact new high­voltage products such as gas­insulated DC switchgear for up to 500 kilovolts, DC breakers, and gas­insulated DC trans­ mission lines. We are seeing a lot of innovations right now.
Another example of DC grid transmission is the connection of offshore wind parks in the North Sea.
In this respect, the past year has been an eventful one.
K. Springer: We have a long record in delivering offshore projects, from the world’s first offshore wind farm more than 20 years ago to the largest offshore wind power plant in opera­ tion today, the London Array. With the current construction of several huge wind parks in the German
North Sea, this market is very active.
The challenge for the installation of converter platforms at sea was a
Karlheinz Springer tough one, but now, the technical success of the projects is becoming evident. Beginning in the second half of this year, the first platform, HelWin1, will transmit up to 576 megawatts pro­ duced in the wind power plants via submarine cable to the German main­ land 85 kilometers away. On the other hand, installation under offshore con­ ditions includes very complex issues that we underestimated and which resulted in delays. However, we have always followed our commitments and worked hard for them by introduc­ ing a cost­reduction program. We have learned our lessons and will de­ liver to our customers the next plat­ forms – even under the harsh offshore conditions in deep water.
These sound like huge technical challenges. How will they affect the price of energy?
K. Springer: HVDC offshore technolo­ gy is still in its early stages of develop­ ment, so there is still a large potential for cost reduction. With continuous research, we will see more and more technical improvements as well as innovations to satisfy the market. Our experience with the converter off­ shore platform will certainly pay off in the future. Space, for example, is an important factor in offshore con­ struction. Our new gas­insulated
DC switchyard technology gives us a
90 percent reduction in space com­ pared to air insulation, which we used before. This is a real advantage in platform building and very cost­effec­ tive. As always, we are committed to listening to the customer and offering solutions for cost reduction.
Another field is the modernization of existing AC grids. Can you point out some current developments?
K. Springer: In established econo­ mies like the USA and Europe, but also especially in Russia, most of the
AC grids are more than 30 years old, and many components need to be replaced. We expect that one third of all grid investment will be spent on the modernization of obsolete grids in order to prevent blackouts. In many countries, we have fully local­ ized portfolios, where we produce transformers, high­voltage products, and other components. In Russia,
Siemens has a factory in Voronezh and is regarded as a local manufacturer and a national brand. Together with the utilities and the know­how of the regulators, we are developing solu­ tions to modernize the grid and ensure the stability.
Capacities of transmission lines will increase further in the future.
How do you expect global marketdemand to develop?
K. Springer: There is no doubt that new technologies, such as FACTS
(flexible AC transmission systems) and GIL (gas­insulated transmission lines), are emerging. They increase the transmission capacity of AC sys­ tems very effectively. Siemens is watching their long­term trajectory.
We are also, for example, working on a different application for trans­ formers based on new electrical equipment. Together with our central
R&D department at Siemens, we are analyzing the demands of the market.
And we discuss openly with our cus­ tomers the technological needs in the globalized world as well as ways of coping with the challenges they are confronted with. Our commitment is to understand our customers, to care for their needs, and to drive their business success.
p
Onno Groß is a veteran correspondent for various German media based in Hamburg. His focus is on business, science, and the environment.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 75

A multitude of AC and DC lines come in and go out of
Transpower’s terraced substation built on the lush green slope of Haywards Hill near Lower Hutt, some
20 kilometers from New Zealand’s capital Wellington.
Text: Garry Barker Photos: Guy Frederick

The HVDC Inter-Island link connects the grids of the
North and the South Island of New Zealand since 1965.
In 2012, Pole 1 was decommissioned and in 2013 the new Pole 3 was added, together with a control
system upgrade for Pole 2.
S ome call New Zealand the
“Shaky Isles,” recognition that its two long, narrow main is­ lands straddle major fault lines in the earth’s crust. The landscape is beauti­ ful, ranging from broad green pastures and sapphire blue lakes to steep rug­ ged snow­capped mountains and wide snow­fed crystal clear rivers. But be­ neath them lies the constant threat of major earthquake activity.
Christchurch, a beautiful city, the larg­ est in the South Island, was nearly destroyed by a series of disastrous earthquakes since 2010. The first quake, of magnitude 7.1 on the Mercalli scale, struck in the early morning of Sep­ tember 4, 2010. Hundreds of after­ shocks followed until a catastrophic
6.3 magnitude quake struck at mid­ day on February 22, 2011. Major city buildings collapsed, killing 185 people and leaving thousands more injured.
Since then more than 11,000 quakes have occurred, most small – magni­ tude 2 or 3 – almost all around Christ­ church but recently touching the
national capital, Wellington, on the southern tip of the North Island. It was in this most challenging environ­ ment that Siemens, under contract to
Transpower, the government­owned grid management company, de­ signed, built, tested, installed and commissioned a high­voltage direct current (HVDC) state­of­the­art thy­ ristor­based converter and intercon­ nector system, capable of withstand­ ing a one­in­2,500­years earthquake event. It has an installed capability of 1,400 megawatts, of which current­ ly 1,200 megawatts are used due to the limited capacity of the submarine
cables.
The buildings and the equipment now running in the valve hall, switchyard and transformer bays at Transpower’s
Haywards site, 25 miles north of Wel­ lington, and at Benmore, the hydro­ substation in the far South Island, have been built to that incredible standard.
The system is unique.
Andrew Gard is Transpower’s project director for the
HVDC Pole 3 project and juggled the installation and testing of the new equipment in a live environment.
The project involved replacing the original Pole 1, a 49­year­old mercury arc system with a new thyristor­based
Pole 3 as well as refurbishing Pole 2, installed in 1992, with a new, state­of­ the­art control system. The original interconnection consisting only of
Pole 1 was rated at 270 kilovolts,
540 megawatts but underwent a major upgrade between 1987 and 1992, producing a so­called hybrid link of two poles, the existing Pole 1 and
Pole 2 rated 350 kilovolts, which add­ ed 700 megawatts with modern thy­ ristor valves. u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 79

Reportage
On the South Island, the HVDC link begins at Benmore substation, where the hydropower collected from the surrounding lakes is transformed to DC to travel north – or, in turn, North Island power is fed into the South Island AC grid.
The new Pole 3, installed by Siemens, has a continuous rating of 700 mega­ watts in both directions and, as with
Pole 2, is capable of operating in
bipole and individually in monopole configurations. The bidirectional
design is needed because, in winter when power demands are high for heating, water stocks in the dams feeding the hydroturbines can run low; rain becomes snow and snow does not melt until spring. Then, power from the North Island’s gener­ ators – geothermal, hydro, gas, wind and the sole New Zealand coal­fired station at Huntly – is needed to meet
South Island needs.
Similar standards and equipment up­ grades were built into the Benmore substation in southern Canterbury where hydro output is collected and converted to DC current for transmis­ sion at 350 kilovolts over 611 kilome­ ters north to the three submarine
cables that carry it across the turbu­ lent Cook Strait and then on overhead lines to Haywards. There it is converted to 220 kilovolt AC for the 700­plus kilometer journey through the North
Island to Auckland and beyond.
If Transpower’s new system is unique, so, too, were the formidable construc­ tion and electrical engineering prob­ lems that were solved.
Firstly, Haywards is a mere 300 meters from a major fault line; hence the seis­ mic standard demanded. Secondly,
50 percent of the nation’s total power is supplied by hydro generating sta­ tions in the far south of the South
I sland, but 76 percent of the 4.5 mil­ lion population lives in the North
Island, one third of it (about 1.12 mil­ lion) in Auckland. If Haywards failed or stopped for even a few hours, the consequences for the national econo­ my and well­being would be huge.
Thirdly, the existing system could not be shut down while the build proceed­ ed. Concrete was poured, footings were installed and equipment con­ nected while 350,000 volts surged above the engineers and workmen.
Yet not one serious accident occurred in the four years.
Dr. Günther Wanninger, the electrical engineer who headed the Siemens team in New Zealand for the four years of the project, says the seismic challenge was “the biggest we ever had to face.”
“We had to apply the highest seismic standards in the design for an inter­ connect that is a major part of the
New Zealand infrastructure. Recently there was an earthquake in Welling­ ton, reasonably big – magnitude 6.7 – but with the design we have applied, there was no effect at Haywards.” u
80 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Hon Simon Bridges,
Minister of Energy and Resources
Hon Simon Bridges at his office at the Beehive,
Wellington’s iconic
parliament building.
New Zealand’s energetic
Minister of Energy and Re­ sources, Hon Simon Bridges, says the major upgrade to
Transpower’s high­voltage transmission and control system will secure New
Zealand’s electricity system for the next 20 to 30 years. investment the Government will make in the grid over the next eight years, he says. By increasing geo­ thermal and wind genera­ tion, the Government plans to raise renewable supply beyond 90 percent by 2025.
Ultimately, the country’s only coal­fired power sta­ tion at Huntly in the North
Island will be closed.
Security and reliability of generation and supply are not sufficiently discussed by either Government or the public, he says. “We take it for granted and don’t de­ bate it enough, but we must be sure of supply in our challenging environment.
The HVDC project just com­ pleted will support New
Zealand in security of sup­ ply far into the future.”
It is the largest single com­ ponent of the NZ$5 billion
“I believe our system, with about 75 percent of total generation from renewable sources, is one of the best in the world. It gives us many advantages,” states Bridges.
“Our population is growing, particularly north of Taupo
(in the center of the North
Island) but, as Christchurch rebuilds after its disastrous earthquakes in 2010 and
2011, we can see population and demand growing there, too. In Christchurch we have by some measures the biggest rebuilding project in the world going on, and as that progresses and business and industry re­ develop, demand for elec­ tricity there will also grow.”
Efficiency in use of energy is constantly improving and
New Zealand now has more than 1 million smart me­ ters, Bridges explains.
“There is also scope to im­ prove the use of electricity in transport.”
“The HVDC upgrade is a great success in terms of knowledge and skills for
New Zealand,” says Simon
Bridges. “Return on this in­ vestment will be good.”

Project director
Andrew Gard explains the smoothing reactor’s special damping system in front of the camera.
82 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Siemens designed new damper solutions for each piece of equipment and built in extra cable loops.
Benmore also had seismic challenges, a little lower than Haywards, but the same standards were applied there.
“It made commercial sense for us to have a single design. The buildings are identical,” Dr. Wanninger says.
Aurecon, a New Zealand company with a worldwide reputation in seismic engineering, produced new designs for lead­rubber bearings, 600 milli­ meters in diameter, and sliders, to protect the long, deep piles on which the buildings and the equipment are mounted from both vertical and horizontal movement. Now the valve hall, for example, can move up to
700 millimeters horizontally without damage in an earthquake. Everything in the switchyard is similarly isolated from shocks.
“Aurecon tells me there is no build­ ing in the world that has such high seismic standards as the valve halls we have built for Transpower,”
Dr. Wanninger says.
“We have built for high seismic re­ quirements in California, China and
Chile, but those standards were not high enough for New Zealand,” he says. “So we had to design new equip­ ment, new damper solutions, and most had to be put on a shake table in­ to which we put earthquake data for the rigorous testing we carried out.
But the transformers (300 tonnes each) were too big to do that, so in parallel we made computer models and ran those with several ‘design earthquakes’ to show the equipment could withstand such forces.”
Further electrical performance tests were done on­site, but because of that single­backbone configuration of the grid, testing had to be done while the grid was live. Nothing could be isolat­ ed; again, a unique problem.
Electrical engineer Andrew Gard,
Transpower’s project director, explains the problem: “New Zealand operates a market system determined by sup­ ply and demand, governing price and source of the power. Siemens at the fac­
Dr. Günther Wanninger,
Siemens tory in Germany tested every scenario –
1,500 tests over ten months testing the control system to its limits. We could not do that on the grid; it would take years. So we chose a representa­ tive sample to test the boundaries of those factory tests in the live environ­ ment – about 190 tests.
“Test plans had to be written for each of those and submitted for approval from the Transpower grid manager.
The plans went back and forth and a security analysis was done on the proposed test for the day, because grid conditions vary, day to day, hour to hour,” Mr. Gard says.
u
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 83

Reliable power supply keeps the lights on in “the coolest little capital in the world.”
Wellington is New Zealand’s political center, its second-largest city and an important hub for the country’s world-famous film industry.
But it was not just a matter of starting a test. Electricity flows had to be jug­ gled within the market. A test might require 500 megawatts to go south for an hour or two, but the market might want to send 800 megawatts north. “So we set up our own market trading team,” Mr. Gard says.
Flow on the grid changes as market traders do deals minute by minute to get best prices and meet demand.
So, the test team’s traders had to pay to control and, in effect, distort the market and get the flows needed for some of the testing. They had to check that no maintenance was in train and no AC transmission con­ straint that might block the flow.
“You are just juggling everything – maintenance, generator situation, and so on – two or three hours before the test,” he says. “Some tests took a few minutes, but the average dura­ tion was half an hour to an hour.”
84 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Transpower’s chief executive Patrick
Strange monitored the tests and the cost. “We probably spent NZ$20 mil­ lion to achieve the flows we wanted,” he says. “It was a world first. We were nervous about doing it, but we couldn’t see any other way, and it was successful. It was a new experience for Siemens, too, but they came to the party and between us we achieved the results we wanted.” u
Andrew Gard,
Project Director HVDC Pole 3
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 85

Reportage
New Zealand
From Benmore substation on the South Island the HVDC line travels 534 km overland to Fighting Bay in the Marlborough Sounds area.
3 x 350 kV/500 MW submarine cables of 40 km length bridge the Cook Strait from Fighting Bay to
Oteranga Bay on the southern tip of the North Island.
Further 37 km of HVDC line continue from Oteranga Bay to Haywards substation near Lower Hutt.
The upgrade increased the HVDC link capacity by more than
from
to currently
The technology is future-proofed to boost capacity to
New Zealand’s electricity generation by fuel type (2011)
Other Thermal 0.1 %
1.3 %
Coal 4.7 %
Wind 4.5 %
13.4 %
Gas 18.4 %
57.6 %
Source: Energy Data File, 2011 Calendar Year Edition
New Zealand’s electricity demand by region (2011)
North Island
(Auckland and Northland)
28 %
Auckland
Hamilton
Wellington
Christchurch
North Island (Other)
Tauranga
Dunedin
South Island
37 %
34 %
Award-winning filmmaker Gerard Smyth takes you on a visually stunning journey along the backbone of
New Zealand’s transmission system as raindrops feed rivers on the South Island, lakes generate power and
HVDC travels over land and sea to the North Island.
siemens.com/living-energy/pole3
Living Energy at
86 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Reportage
Minister of Energy and Resources
Hon Simon Bridges says that New
Zealand aims to push renewable out­ put above 90 percent of national needs, raising geothermal output from the current 14 percent to above
20 percent and doubling wind gener­ ation, now at 4.5 percent, over the next decade to 15 years. “And it is all based on strong market principles, not supported by government subsi­ dies,” he says.
New Zealand’s HVDC project was a huge challenge for everyone involved, from the Siemens and Transpower engineers and site technicians to the construction and transport teams and the principals who took responsi­ bility for the venture’s success.
“This is the first of its kind and some­ thing nobody has done before,”
Dr. Wanninger says. “So now, we have equipment certified to these extreme­ ly high levels. We will see if anyone will ever ask again for such high re­ quirements. Maybe Japan in the fu­ ture after their recent earthquakes.
We are now building on a platform in the North Sea and that also is very challenging. Siemens is prepared to take up any challenge and we never give up. When we commit to a project we will finish it, whatever the chal­ lenges, and that is good for me as an engineer.”
Transpower CEO Patrick Strange, who oversaw the four­year project, has the last word: “We chose Siemens because we know the quality of their work. They don’t know how to build bad products. They build to very high standards and take great pride in their engineering. We were confident
Siemens would build very high­quali­ ty equipment and systems and we were right. Transpower and Siemens can be very pleased and satisfied with what has been achieved.” p
Patrick Strange was CEO of Transpower until end of January 2014 and can look back on the successful completion of one of the largest infrastructure projects in New Zealand’s recent history.
Patrick Strange,
Transpower CEO from 2007 to 2014
Garry Barker is a technology editor at The Age newspaper in Melbourne, and has worked as a foreign correspondent in over 50 countries.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 87

Essay Essay
Text: Chinedu Nebo Illustration: Burkhard Neie
S ome people, when they look at Africa, see scarcity: They see what’s not there in­ stead of what could be. Whereas I see op­ portunities, and above all a bright future, and I urge everyone to do the same. Nowhere is that more true than in the power sector, especially ours in Nigeria.
A few simple truths are in order. The country does not have enough power. Even if the amount of energy generated in Nigeria today were qua­ drupled, it would not meet demand. And indeed, years of dissipation have allowed our transmis­ sion system to nearly grind to a halt. It is weak, unreliable, and very unstable; system collapses are the order of the day. And indeed, in the past, there has not been enough capital investment to cater for the energy needs of Africa’s most populous nation with more than 170 million in­ habitants. But there are other truths as well:
Change has already begun, and Nigeria’s energy system is transforming fast. The current gov­ ernment has understood that power supply is crucial, not only for our national economic de­ velopment, but also for our survival as a nation.
There is no sense in debating economic and
industrial development, or starting manufactur­ ing companies and small and medium­scale enterprises without having adequate electricity to drive all these economic sectors. Indeed, for an investor in the Nigerian power sector, the opportunities are huge.
From the very beginning of Nigeria’s current revolution in the power sector, our focus has been on private investors. The sheer scale of the challenges Nigeria is facing precludes any de­ velopment managed solely by the state. Nigeria needs to generate 40 times what we are current­ ly generating just to be on par with South Africa in per capita energy consumption. So we have invited private­sector investors to buy already existing assets and massively expand them, and also to build greenfield independent power proj­ ects on their own. What we’re asking from inter­ national investors is foreign direct investment in Nigeria. Come and invest in your own power plants, and if you don’t feel comfortable, part­ ner with Nigerian companies in order to do that.
The government has made the terrain very u
88 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 89

Essay easy and investor­friendly. We issue power pur­ chase agreements to anyone who plans to build a power plant – we’re basically guaranteeing to buy whatever you generate. Current projects have additionally been backed by partial risk guarantees through the World Bank, the African
Development Bank, or sovereign guarantees.
It is my strong belief that investors simply can’t lose in the Nigerian energy sector.
Some might have felt uneasy in the beginning.
Nigeria has developed a bad reputation for corruption in the past. When the privatization exercise began in earnest after the election of
President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011, doubters expected it to fail. But we proved them wrong, and we are proud of that. Corruption has a way of stunting the growth of any society. We have
no choice but to be crusaders against corrup­ tion, and especially in a sector as crucial as the power sector, we have to stem the tide of cor­ ruption that is threatening to drown us as a na­ tion. It doesn’t matter whom you ask: Anyone who has been involved in the privatization of the energy sector so far says that it was carried out transparently and accountably. When the transaction documents were signed between in­ vestors and the Federal Government of Nigeria on February 21, 2013, almost all of the compa­ nies that were created out of the state­run Pow­ er Holding Company of Nigeria changed hands.
That day marked the beginning of a new age for
Nigeria’s power supply.
In the past, the government was responsible for policy formulation, regulation, operation, and investment in the Nigerian power sector. Today, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission ensures a well­balanced regulatory framework for both investors and consumers. The Nigerian
Bulk Electricity Trading PLC negotiates power purchase agreements with independent power producers, backed by state­run credit enhance­ ment instruments. The Transmission Company of Nigeria has been reorganized with help from the international private sector and today is a technically, financially, and commercially viable and – most importantly – market­driven com­ pany. All this is part of the Roadmap for Power
Sector Reform launched by President Jonathan in August 2010, which aims to reduce the role of the state to its core functions: regulation and the promotion of best conditions for those want­ ing to boost Nigeria’s power sector. The rest is up to the private sector: As a government, we recommend the best state­of­the­art power gen­ erating technologies, whether they be gas tur­ bines, coal plants, or wind turbines. As we move towards more renewables, we need wind tur­ bines and facilities for solar energy. We also have some hydropower potential in Nigeria. All the ingredients are there for a veritable gold rush in the energy sector.
Nigeria is quite a blessed country when it comes to energy resources. In the Niger Delta in the south, we have massive reserves of oil and gas:
37.14 billion barrels in proven crude oil reserves, and 5,118 billion cubic meters of proven reserves in natural gas. In the middle belt, huge coal de­ posits are waiting to be exploited. And in the far north, we have high solar radiation. Nigeria is a land of plenty: We have resources everywhere, now we just have to tap into them.
Gas is of particular importance for us since it is the cheapest source, especially for power gener­ ation. Nigeria’s gas reserves are the eighth­larg­ est in the world, so the potential is enormous.
Gas development has not matched demand from the industry and the power sector in the past, but with the gas master plan developed to pro­ vide a long­term perspective for the develop­ ment of gas infrastructure and a huge amount of government resources dedicated to gas sup­ ply, demand and supply for gas in the power sector will be matched in due course. We are
90 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Essay planning to develop more fields, reducing gas flaring to a bare minimum, developing the gas infrastructure with regard to transportation to the power plants that are currently being built, and ensuring that gas molecules are fed more efficiently into the system.
When it comes to the development of efficient and reliable gas­fired power plants, Siemens is one of our major partners. Siemens alone has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Federal Government for the development of 10 gigawatts of power generation capacity.
Gas­fired power plants will be responsible for
70 percent of the power generated by the end of 2014, and for the foreseeable future, gas will retain that prominence. We expect the newly built gas power plants to be up to modern stan­ dards; for areas far from the south and its gas supplies, we are opting, for instance, for small­ er turbines that can be operated using natural gas, but also liquefied natural gas, so that we can solve the problem of transport more easily. In a country as huge and diverse as Nigeria, diver­ sity is the key.
That is also true for power sources. Nigeria has more than 690 million tonnes of proven coal
deposits and about 2.5 billion tonnes of coal re­ serves. These reserves have to be developed, and a large share of them can be used for power generation. Others will be made into smokeless briquettes for environmentally friendly cooking, which is important especially for the rural ar­ eas, where much of the cooking is still done with firewood. Our forests are being depleted, and the Sahara is encroaching into Nigeria – to push back the desert, we’ll need the coal. It is part of our conviction that an energy system for the fu­ ture must be sustainable and provide a better future to even the remotest communities. This is also where renewables such as solar, wind, and in some cases biomass and hydropower come in.
In January 2014, we began a campaign called
“Light up, rural Nigeria.” In a first step, we erect­ ed three pilot stations in communities that are not connected to the national grid. In these vil­ lages, solar energy is now provided to every household. At the same time, the villages re­ ceived an energy hub for communal uses requir­ ing electricity. The president has personally backed this project. Now we’re looking for the u
Chinedu Nebo (62), born in
Kaduna state in northern Nigeria, was appointed as Nigeria’s Minister of Power in February 2013.
He holds a PhD in Material Engineering and Science from the
South Dakota School of Mines and
Technology in the USA. Prior to his appointment in government,
Nebo was Vice Chancellor of
Nigeria’s newly created Federal
University in Oye-Ekiti, after having served in the same capacity at the University of Nigeria in
Nsukka for five years.
Hailed as an impartial technocrat and a reformer in his current as well as his previous positions,
Nebo took over one of the largest privatization efforts undertaken
anywhere in the world, with the aim of transforming a stateowned, run-down energy sector into a privatized, state-of-the-art system. “I believe that everyone of us has an opportunity to make an impact, wherever you are,” he says about the forces driving him in his daily work.
For the father of four and devout
Christian, family and his spiritual beliefs are the key ingredients for his success. He admits that Nigeria still has a long way to go to become the modernized, unified state he wants it to be. “But we’re all working to reposition Nigeria, with the aim of creating a country that our children will be very proud of.”
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 91

Essay
funding to upscale the project, including per­ manent maintenance of these stations even in remote areas.
Sustainability and the variety of energy sources alone will not provide the solution to Nigeria’s electricity challenges. However, these factors are indispensable for attaining sufficiency and na­ tional energy security. Disruptions of oil and gas pipelines would be disastrous in case of total dependency on those fuel types. Therefore, it is crucial to develop coal, hydro, and alternative sources as well. For 2020, we expect a total of at least 20 gigawatts of electricity produced; that would be five times what we produce today, which is about 4 gigawatts. And it will be a good mix that will serve Nigeria well.
Generating power is one challenge – the other is to bring it to consumers. It is indeed a huge challenge, if not the biggest one. The current transmission system is probably our weakest link. But we’re aware of that, and the Nigerian government has already allocated more than
US$3 billion to strengthen transmission capaci­ ty. This is not only intended for stabilizing the existing infrastructure, but for a massive expan­ sion and building a truly national grid. Our aim is to move from the current radial system of trans­ mission to a grid that will make power supply much more reliable and stable. The massive in­ vestments we’ve initiated are also aimed at in­ creasing the capacity of the entire system, so that the fast­growing amount of energy can be trans­ mitted easily. Port Harcourt in the south and
Maiduguri in the north are more than 1,200 kilo­ meters apart – and the distance across from east to west is about the same. This necessitates a massive expansion of transmission lines in a country where hardly any yet exist. To reach that goal, we are investing in the best possible trans­ formers and transmission substations from companies like Siemens, but at the same time also encouraging foreign companies to train human resources in Nigeria to guarantee repairs, maintenance, and servicing of these entities.
The creation of qualified jobs is an integral part of our road map towards a better energy future, as is the aspect of quality. It is true that in terms of energy supply, the country is far behind other nations, especially in the developed world. But again, we choose to see this as an opportunity: the chance to leapfrog ahead and avoid all the mistakes others have made along the way.
As an engineer, I am aware that energy today is mostly knowledge driven. There are no one­ size­fits­all solutions. To satisfy energy needs,
Gross electricity generation (2010)
Total:
27.1 TWh
Hydro (conventional)
5.7 TWh
Oil
4.3 TWh
Gas
17.1 TWh
Population
168.8
million
CO
2
emissions
(2013)
53.3
Mt , CO
2
in total
CO
2
emissions from power generation
13.0
t , CO
2
per capita in total
Source: IEA 2013, IHS Global Insight, World Bank (2012)
92 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
Essay we have to talk about environmental and finan­ cial factors, as well as the sociological and de­ mographic dispositions of the people you want to provide with energy. Modern computer tech­ nology is at least as important for success as is the latest knowledge on how to construct a pow­ er plant. So you need a cross­technological back­ ground in order to be a competitive energy player in the current market. That’s the good thing about being in a knowledge­driven global econ­ omy: We don’t have to reinvent the wheels the developed countries made. We don’t have to go through all the tricky phases they discovered.
We’re just leapfrogging ahead and making sure we have the best that is currently available and feasible for our country.
The national grid will eventually reach the rural areas, but in a country as expansive as Nigeria, extending the national grid to all rural commu­ nities within the next decade is not possible.
The government has therefore decided to provide power to the thousands of rural communities using renewable energy. It is a decision that is also in line with our environmental policy and commitment to mitigation efforts with regard to climate change. Environmentally, Nigeria aims to be in line with the rest of the world. We’ve signed all necessary agreements and we’re eager to implement them. Regulations are in place to stop all flaring activities soon. It’s good for the environment and will create a new source of en­ ergy through the transformation of associated gases in, for example, liquefied natural gas, pro­ pane, or butane. The potential is enormous, given that the National Oceanic and Atmospher­ ic Administration of the USA estimates that al­ most 15 billion cubic meters of gas were flared in 2010 alone. This is the kind of win­win situa­ tion that Nigeria is exploring on its way to a sustainable energy future – and a future of plenty for all.
Once we have sufficient power supply in Nigeria, industry will take off. We don’t lack entrepre­ neurial spirit or business opportunities – it’s the power shortage that is holding us back, indi­ vidually and as a society. Reliable power supply will bring an exponential increase in the number of industrial and manufacturing companies.
National GDP will increase from today’s growth rate of 6.5 percent to double digits, provided there is enough electricity.
Look at the agricultural sector, which is current­ ly being revitalized. The raw materials are avail­ able and could easily be processed into finished products. We can cover the entire value chain in
This short film tells how the Geregu II power plant, built by
Siemens, helps deliver 434 megawatts of power in Nigeria.
Scan the QR code or open the following link:
siemens.com/energy-channel/geregu-2
Nigeria, from planting, cropping, mechanized farming, and harvesting to processing and stor­ ing. All of this can be achieved with a stable and reliable energy system. Industry will grow, but at the same time, small and medium­sized enter­ prises will mushroom as well. We’ll see barber shops, hairdressing saloons, vulcanizers, peo­ ple doing all kinds of things all over the country.
We have seen that happening within only a few weeks in places where we started providing
energy, so you can imagine the effect on a big scale. Power will give our people economic se­ curity, and that will guarantee national security for us as a country. Because if we have economic security on account of having enough power, it will put young people into work.
Nigeria faces a powerful future. I believe that
50 years from now, Nigeria will be one of the world’s top economies. It will be a country where our children will want to live, they won’t want to move elsewhere. It will be a country where people from all over the world will come and want to live, too, and it won’t be divided, but united and very strong. And it will have one of the largest populations in the world, of course.
Nigeria will be the place to be – in Africa, but also worldwide. Power will make us powerful. p
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 93

p. 8 Cover story – Future Energy Systems acatech.de/uk cec.mpg.de siemens.com/energy2050 siemens.com/future-of-energy-2050 p. 22 Fire and Ice in Thailand amata.com siemens.com/energy/gasturbines p. 36 Integrating Components for Smart Grids accenture.com siemens.com/smartgrid p. 40 Turnkey Plant gmexico.com siemens.com/energy/CCPP p. 50 Energy on Tap paulaner.com siemens.com/energy/hv-gil p. 56 A Rising Tide narec.co.uk siemens.com/energy/oceanpower p. 70 Hands-on Training siemens.com/energy/wind-service p. 72 The Return of DC siemens.com/energy/powertransmission p. 76 Quake-Proof Substations transpower.co.nz siemens.com/energy/hvdc p. 88 Power Potential power.gov.ng
p. 102 Spotlight siemens.com/energy/wind-service
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94 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
The planned development of Green Port Hull will involve the regeneration of an existing port complex.
Siemens has announced the construction of a new factory for the production of its next-generation offshore wind turbine rotor blades in Paull, Yorkshire, on the Humber estuary on the east coast of Great Britain, scheduled to commence production in the summer of 2016. A new logistics and service center close by in Green Port Hull is also planned to be operational by 2016.
Both projects will be implemented together with Associated British Ports (ABP). While Siemens’ investment will exceed £160 million (€190 million), adding ABP’s share, the amount will total
£310 million (€371 million).
This boost of offshore wind turbine expertise in Great Britain will likewise entail a promising regeneration for the Hull region and stimulate the country’s job market: One thousand jobs will be created, with 550 in rotor blade production and 450 in Green
Port Hull, and in addition many hundreds of jobs during the construction phase and beyond. Siemens already has a workforce of around 14,000 in Great Britain, 1,500 of which are currently employed in the British wind power business.
Prime Minister David Cameron
British Prime Minister David Cameron and Michael Suess,
Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of the Energy Sector, on the announcement of Siemens’ decision to invest £160 million in wind turbine production and installation facilities in Yorkshire.
The British Prime Minister David Cameron and Michael Suess,
Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of the
Energy Sector, affirmed their common dedication to these projects in a ceremony in Hull on March 25, 2014. With more than
2,200 turbines onshore and offshore and a total capacity of more than 5,000 megawatts, the company is a leading supplier for wind turbines as well as grid connection and service for onshore and offshore sites in the UK.
siemens.com/energy/hull-project
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 95

In Short
The HVDC converter station in Püssi, Estonia.
The valve hall of the HVDC converter
station in Anttila, Finland.
The completion of the EstLink 2 project, a 170-kilometer high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link between converter stations in Anttila, Finland, and Püssi, Estonia, marks a significant step towards meeting the goals of the European
Union’s Baltic Energy Market Interconnection Plan (BEMIP). It was installed for customers Fingrid, the Finnish transmission system operator, and the Estonian transmission system operator Elering.
Chairman of the Elering board Taavi Veskimägi said that the new connection will enable Nordic power producers to enter the Baltic electricity market and vice versa.
“More producers, more connections and an open competitive market all make for the best electricity price,” he said.
The new, more reliable joint transmission capacity between the two countries is now increased from 350 megawatts to 1,000 megawatts. An HVDC connection has 30 to
40 percent less transmission loss than a comparable three-phase AC transmission connection and is the perfect solution for long-distance power transmission.
Siemens was responsible for designing the HVDC system as a monopolar connection with insulated metallic return conductor. This turnkey project included delivering, installing and commissioning the complete HVDC converter stations, excluding the overhead line and power cable between the stations. Total value of the converter station turnkey project was €100 million, which is around one third of the total EstLink 2 interconnection budget.
In December 2013, Siemens and IHI Corporation commissioned a turnkey high-efficiency steam power plant owned by Trianel Kohlekraftwerk Lünen GmbH & Co. KG in Lünen, Germany. The power plant has an installed electrical capacity of 750 megawatts and an electrical efficiency of almost 46 percent, which makes it the cleanest and most efficient hard-coal-fired power plant in Europe. Thus, by using cutting-edge Siemens technology, up to a million tonnes of CO
2
are saved every year.
With 7,000 full-load operating hours predicted for 2014, the Lünen plant can provide electricity for around 1.5 million households. It also supplies the city of Lünen with district heating. At the core of the plant is a SST5-6000 high-performance steam turbine, which guarantees not only highly efficient operation in base load, but is also ideally suited for highly responsive ramping. These properties are crucial to meeting fluctuations in demand due to the increasing proportion of renewables.
96 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
In Short
Turbine testing and validation specialists deal with extremely large data streams to analyze turbine behavior – the latest
Siemens large gas turbines may generate up to 12 terabytes of data in the Berlin test facility during the day – and, in addition, the engineers have to travel to remote locations to inspect them. A team of Siemens Energy test field engineers in Berlin and Corporate Technology scientists in Russia has now developed a solution to take the industrial monitoring of turbines to the cloud.
The platform, called “Engine Live Visualization” (ELVis), joins innovative technologies from real-time Web 2.0 and cloud computing to collect, store, process and visualize large amounts of turbine-based information. As a result, more than 100 experts can now monitor tests of new turbines remotely from their home facilities, thus sharply reducing travel costs and increasing their availability.
Siemens inaugurated its new Middle
East headquarters in Masdar City, Abu
Dhabi, which will provide a workplace for 800 employees. Its design, sustainable building materials and the energysaving integrated building technologies from Siemens reduce the building’s
energy consumption by almost 50 percent, compared to conventional buildings of the same size.
The building, which was designed by acclaimed UK architects Sheppard Robson, has garnered 16 awards to date.
One of the most important benchmarks includes the Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification. It is the first office building in Abu Dhabi to be awarded with this prestigious rating standard.
Cape Wind and Siemens have signed a major contract for the construction of what is expected to be the United States’ first utility-scale offshore wind power plant. Upon expected financial closing later this year,
Siemens will supply Cape
Wind with its industry-leading
3.6-megawatt offshore wind turbines, an offshore electric service platform (ESP), and a long-term service agreement.
Once completed, the new wind power plant, which is situated 20 kilometers off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA, will have a capacity of up to 468 megawatts. Installation and commissioning is expected for 2016.
The external shading system provides 100 percent shading to 95 percent of the glazed surfaces.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 97

In Short
At CERAWeek 2014, Siemens
CEO Joe Kaeser explained the company’s response to the global energy transformation.
In March, more than 2,000 executives from the world’s leading oil, gas and power companies as well as government officials convened in Houston, Texas, USA, for the annual IHS Energy CERAWeek to discuss the rapid pace of change in energy markets, technologies and geopolitics. In addition to meeting the US Secretary of
Energy and key customers, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser held the keynote speech on
“Gas Day.”
In his speech Mr. Kaeser highlighted the “tectonic shift” of the shale gas revolution, which hailed a “golden era of gas.” He also provided insights into how Siemens is responding to the global energy transformation with its workforce of 350,000 employees in more than 190 countries.
Further activities at CERAWeek included Future Influencers, an exclusive global think tank of 200 young thought leaders initiated by Siemens, and dialogue sessions, which closely examined the development of unconventional energy resources along with the geopolitics of meeting energy demand and supply.
Designed for iPad or Android tablet, the Siemens Publications App provides convenient access to the digital editions of Living
Energy and the company’s other customer magazines, and hence to features, background reports, and interviews with international experts across all sectors.
siemens.com/ publications-app/en/
US-based Zolo Technologies and Siemens have expanded their previous collaboration to a global license agreement for fossil-fueled steam generation boiler applications. In the future, both companies will integrate their combustion optimization products more closely and actively extend their market activities beyond Europe into the USA, China and further fossil markets in Asia.
Zolo Technologies’ unique laser-based combustion monitoring system ZoloBOSS™ will be integrated as part of
Siemens’ SPPA-P3000 Process Optimization solution for fossil-fueled steam generating power plants, thus providing previously unattainable real-time, in-furnace combustion information and furnace control. As a result, combustion efficiency will improve significantly, NO x
and CO
2 emissions will be reduced, and availability and thermal performance enhanced.
Siemens has been awarded the contract for the engineering, procurement, and construction of the San Gabriel combined cycle power plant (CCPP) by First
NatGas Power Corp., a subsidiary of the Philippine independent power producer
First Gen Corporation. The heart of the 414-megawatt power plant is a Siemens
SGT6-8000H gas turbine.
With an efficiency of more than 60 percent, San Gabriel will be the most efficient gas-fired power plant in
Southeast Asia. After the
Santa Rita and San Lorenzo
CCPPs, the San Gabriel facility is now the third that
Siemens will construct and operate as a turnkey power plant in the Philippines.
98 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
In Short
Following a performance improvement effort of the Siemens customer service team at Shell, which was backed by management support and focus changes,
Siemens’ rotating equipment aftermarket performance in the northern part of the
North Sea improved substantially. Maintenance costs were reduced by more than
50 percent while availability scaled from an average of some 70 percent up to 90 percent. Reliability improved from less than 80 percent to 95 percent on average.
In recognition of their achievement and the improved customer relationship, the team, now embedded at Shell as the
E S SO SGT Shell team, received a Siemens
Silver Champions Award. Shell also applauded the step change in performance level on the North Sea contract. “Siemens have enhanced their reputation for their gas turbines and their aftermarket support. We at Shell have reliable production,” said James May, Team Lead for Rotating Equipment, Shell UK.
MidAmerican Energy Company will use the 448 wind turbines to equip five wind power projects in Iowa.
Mark Albenze, CEO of Siemens Energy’s Wind Power Onshore
Americas business (right), and Adam Wright, Vice President of
Wind Generation and Development, MidAmerican Energy.
Siemens will supply 448 wind turbines with a total capacity of
1.05 gigawatts to MidAmerican Energy Company and provide service and maintenance. It is the largest onshore wind power order to date and the largest single order for onshore wind power to be awarded globally. “This new order from MidAmerican Energy once again highlights that we are one of the leading suppliers in the USA,” says Dr. Markus Tacke, CEO of the
Wind Power Division of Siemens Energy.
MidAmerican Energy Company will equip five wind power projects in Iowa with G2 platform wind turbines, which have a nominal rating of 2.3 megawatts and a rotor diameter of
108 meters. They will provide energy for nearly 320,000 US households when they are installed in 2015. Iowa is one of the leading US states in wind energy generation, which accounted for 24 percent of total energy production in 2012.
So far, Siemens has already installed 1.2 gigawatts of wind power capacity for MidAmerican Energy Company.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 99

In Retrospect
This issue of Living Energy celebrates the tenth edition of our magazine. Siemens would like to thank all the interview partners from business, politics, and science for sharing their views on how to shape and change the energy world with our Living
Energy correspondents around the globe – and therefore with you, dear reader. We are looking forward to bringing you more premium content in our future issues!
Spanning the globe, spanning technologies: Living Energy portrays renewable power projects (here, a wind park in New
Zealand) ...
B2B reportages also have a fixed place in the magazine and are created alongside a documentary film. For Oman’s Power
People and all the other movies, see the Siemens channel on YouTube.
The following international luminaries graced the covers of the first ten issues, with many others featured inside: Christoph Frei,
Richard H. Jones, Frank Mastiaux, Khaled Abubakr, Leonhard Birnbaum, Michael Liebreich, Yvo de Boer, Michael Suess, Kandeh Yumkella,
Jeremy Rifkin, Michael Stoppard, Robert Schlögl.
100 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
... and sheds light on groundbreaking technologies as well.
An essay by an eminent authority on a nation’s energy system and energy policy, such as the one by Sergei
Shmatko, former Russian
Energy Minister, is another regular feature of Living Energy.
The international magazine covers the whole energy chain, or power matrix, and includes indepth articles on various interesting projects, here a high-voltage transmission solution implemented in
New Jersey, USA.
Launched in February 2012, the
Living Energy iPad app includes all the magazine’s content – and more: from image galleries to audiofiles and animated features.
Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014 101

Operational Flexibility
With innovative service operation vessels, technicians can access turbines safely in seas of up to 2.5 meters wave height.
Andrés Chacon, Technical Product Manager for Maintenance
Solutions. Having joined
Siemens one and a half years ago, Andrés Chacon managed the design and construction phase of the SOV. His biggest challenge has been to search for the right supplier to implement all of the SOV’s innovative features.
Access to offshore wind parks – especially in rough seas – presents a logistical challenge.
Currently, it involves a combination of transfer vessels, floating solutions, and helicopters.
To further improve Siemens’ service and maintenance solutions for far-shore wind parks,
Andrés Chacon and his team developed service operation vessels (SOVs).
When put into service in the Baltic 2 wind park in Germany’s Baltic Sea in 2015, the new
SOVs will save time and money, and increase safety: They will offer accommodation for
Siemens technicians, who then won’t have to return to the coast each day. Their storage facilities allow common spare parts to be stocked offshore close to the wind park. “A further benefit will be that we will gain in speed serving far-shore wind farms,” explains
Andrés Chacon. Their self-stabilizing platforms with gangways will provide direct access to the turbines, thereby reducing the risks involved with boat landing and ladders.
104 Living Energy · No. 10 | May 2014
May
2014
05–08,
05–08, Las Vegas, USA
06–08, Landshut, Germany
June
2014
03–05, Cologne, Germany
10–12, Calgary, Canada
11–12, Glasgow, UK
Aug
2014
24–29, Paris, France
25–28, Stavanger, Norway
Sep
2014
10–12, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
15–18, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Oct
2014
12–14, Abu Dhabi, UAE
26–30, Jeju, Korea
Nov
2014
10–13, Abu Dhabi, UAE siemens.com/energy/tradeshows
23–26, Hamburg, Germany
28–30, Moscow, Russia

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