Equipment Failure Brings South Carolina Unit Offline

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--A 590-megawatt (MW) coal-fired unit at Santee Cooper's (Moncks Corner, South Carolina) Cross Generating Station (Cross, South Carolina) was forced offline Monday night. The unit suffered from a transformer malfunction. A component on the transformer must be replaced in order for the unit to run properly. Plans were initially to restart the unit as soon as possible, but because of a parts delay, this cannot take place until possibly the weekend. The unit had been online since August 2008 after being offline in order to repair a boiler-tube leak.

The station has a major outage scheduled in March on Unit 2 (556 MW) that will last approximately six or seven weeks. Many major components on the turbine/generator and boiler will be either repaired or replaced. The next major outages will take place on the remaining three units in 2010.

Santee Cooper is South Carolina's state-owned electric and water utility and the state's largest power producer, supplying electricity to more than 163,000 retail customers. Santee Cooper also generates the power distributed by the state's 20 electric cooperatives to more than 700,000 customers in all 46 counties.

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