Jacksonville Electric Authority Prepares for Major Outage at Northside Station

---

Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources Incorporated; Houston, Texas). A 60-day maintenance outage is scheduled for a 564 megawatt (MW) unit at the Northside Generating Station during the first quarter of 2003. The thirty-five year old plant in Jacksonville, Florida consists of three units with a combined capacity of 1,160 MW.

The three Northside Generating Station units burned oil and natural gas until August 1999, when the Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA), owner and operator of the station, began a $630 million project to convert two of the older units (Units 1 and 2) to burn a mixture of petroleum coke and coal. These two 298 MW units were installed with two Foster Wheeler circulating fluidized-bed boilers (CFBs).

The sixty day outage, scheduled for Northside Generating Station's third unit, which is a gas/oil Riley Stoker front-fired dry bottom boiler and a Westinghouse turbine and generator set. The scope of the maintenance outage will include; complete electrical testing and inspection, exciter replacement, stator/rotor re-wedging and reconditioning, retainer ring inspection, bucketing/blading/diaphragm inspections, valve/bearing/gearbox repairs and non-destructive testing (NDE).

Jacksonville Electric Authority is Florida's largest municipal electric utility and the eighth largest in the U.S.