GE Rentals Fill the Breach with 31 MW of Emergency Power when Flood Outs Michigan Power Station

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). For a company that was formed - "to offer rental equipment for temporary distributed power and climate control applications in the commercial, industrial, utility, oil and gas and special events industries" - the opportunity to supply portable diesel generators and transformers to back up a flood hit power station must have been a defining moment.

In mid-May this year, a dike on the Silver River Basin was breached causing an eight billion gallon surge in the Dead River, which inundated the Presque Isle power plant (PEC 18001648, 18000631), which is located on Lakeshore Boulevard along the river near its mouth at Lake Superior in Marquette, Michigan. Debris strewn water reached levels of four to five feet inside the plant, damaging equipment and submerging generating units in the 625 MW capacity plant. The plant operators who were warned of the oncoming flood were able to shut down the generators just ahead of the water, which to some extent contained the calamity.

GE Energy Rentals Incorporated (New York, New York) was contracted to provide 27 x 1,350 kW diesel generators, 17 step-up transformers and around 37,000 feet of cable for the flooded areas. The rental equipment was divided between two substations in the Iron Mountain area to help maintain voltage support for the weakened power grid. Within one week of the outage at the Presque Isle plant, the two sites were up and running.

Plant owner, We Energies, the principal utility business of Wisconsin Energy (NYSE:WEC) (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), used GE Energy Rentals until the power plant was back on line. Two of the nine generating units were back on line by mid June generating 176 MW. The GE team's equipment had been supplying 31 MW of power for the plant that covers around 50% of generation in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The high voltage transmission system owned by American Transmission Company (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) the independent regional transmission utility was not designed to allow power to be temporarily imported from outside the Upper Peninsula region. Mining operations take 300 MW and homes and business in the area take the balance of about 325 MW of Presque Isle's output.

GE Industrial Systems (GEIS) (NYSE:GE) (Atlanta, Georgia) worked with their Rentals colleagues to return the power plant to full capacity. Five exciters needed replacement with new EX2000s, four existing EX2000s were repaired and three Kramerstat drives needed replacement with new wound rotor motor controllers. "Employees at multiple levels of the organization, on many different team at GEIS and GEPS (GE Power Systems), committed the time and energy to get the power plant up and running in truly record time," said Mark Sydow, general manager of GE Industrial Systems Global Projects.