Genesis Power’s Huntly Unit 5 Prepares for Commercial Operation

---

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Genesis Power (Manukau, New Zealand) has completed construction and start-up testing for the $530 million 400 MW Huntly combined cycle addition. The Huntly plant is located 70 miles from Auckland in the Manukau area.

Construction for the project started in May 2005 and was completed earlier this year. Genesis expects full commercial operation sometime this month. Genesis hired Downer Engineering (Auckland, New Zealand) as the owner’s engineer and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) (Tokyo, Japan), was contracted as the engineering and construction firm over this project. Unit 5 consists of a one-on-one combined cycle unit equipped with a 250 MW MHI M701G combustion turbine with a DEPL/NEM design and a horizontal gas flow heat recovery steam generator that will produce steam for use in each section of the135 MW MHI TCSF-30 multi-stage steam turbine. Genesis has also signed a twelve year long term service agreement with MHI to oversee planned and unplanned maintenance on the power train.

With the addition of Unit 5, the Huntly facility will represent 17% of electrical generation to the national grid and will represent 50% of Genesis’s total capacity. Originally planned as a 1,000 MW coal facility in 1970, construction began in 1973 with commercial operations beginning in 1982 on Unit 1. The plant was completed in 1985 when the last of the four 250 MW units came on-line. Due to large growth in the Auckland area, Genesis Power added a 40 MW GE LM6000 simple-cycle unit in 2004 increasing the plant’s capacity to 1,040 MW. The new combined-cycle train will give the power station the ability of supplying 1,435 MW of electrical generation to the grid. Genesis is currently reviewing plans to construct an additional 400 MW natural gas combine–cycle power station in the Rodney area.

Genesis Power Limited is the country’s largest gas and electric retailer, and is a state-owned enterprise that was the result of the breakup of the Electricity Corporation of New Zealand (ECNZ) in 1999. The Huntly plant is the only coal–fired generation facility in the country. Huntly’s Unit 5 project was launched by Prime Minster Helen Clark in 2005, making it one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country. Genesis was directly responsible for the redesign of the Tainui Bridge in Huntly which required re-enforcements, and a arch support system to increase the load-bearing capacity to accommodate the unit components that took 5 days to transport, the largest of which was the gas turbine weighing 372 tons which took over 9 hours to transport.

View Plant Profile – 1059506
View Project Report – 87300017

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) provides marketing communication services ranging from industrial database solutions to market forecasting, custom analytics, and specialty promotions that support high-level image campaigns.