Leakage Issue Forces San Juan Power Plant Offline

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Public Service Company of New Mexico’s San Juan generating station was forced offline today due to an unplanned outage occurring at one of the plant’s coal fired units. The 534-megawatt unit 3 was taken offline due to a leak in the superheater. This particular unit has been experiencing several leakage issues over the past week. The same unit was brought offline last Thursday due to a leak in the stator’s cooling water system. Engineers are hoping to have these issues resolved by this weekend.

The San Juan generating station is located 15 miles northwest of Farmington, New Mexico, and is owned by Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM). It consists of four coal-fired units, which generate approximately 1,800 megawatts of electricity. San Juan is PNM’s primary source of generation serving 58% of the company’s customers. Environmentally, the plant is a zero-discharge facility. This means all water consumed by the plant is either recycled or evaporates. In some cases, water is reused ten times before leaving the plant’s stacks. In 2002, San Juan contracted to supply the Phoenix Cement Company up to 300,000 tons of fly ash to be recycled for use in cement production.

PNM serves more than 487,000 electricity customers in New Mexico and 492,000 natural gas customers. The company is based in Albuquerque with offices in more than 20 cities. PNM is one of four subsidiaries of PNM Resources (NYSE:PNM).

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