GE Energy to Supply Turbines for GDF Suez's 430-Megawatt Combined-Cycle Project

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--GDF Suez (EPA:GSZ) (Paris), which was formed by the merger of French gas and power majors Gaz de France and Suez, has awarded a construction contract for the 430-megawatt Montoir-de-Bretagne combined-cycle power station to GE Energy, a unit of General Electric (NYSE:GE) (Fairfield, Connecticut). The site for the power project is adjacent to one of the company's major liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) terminals on the Atlantic Coast in the Loire Estuary near the town of Ville de Saint-Nazaire.

According to the $335 million contract, GE will supply a 9FB gas turbine and a type A15 steam turbine. GE claims that the 9FB is the world's most advanced cool air technology gas turbine, representing the latest in class F technology. The turbine has a track record of 25 million hours of operation worldwide and has a thermal efficiency of more than 58%. The turbine is produced for electricity networks with 50-hertz frequency, which is that of France's RTE grid network.

The turbine was manufactured at GE's Belfort plant in northeastern France, which is the site for the company's European headquarters and Worldwide Center of Excellence. It took three weeks to deliver the turbine to Montoir-de-Bretagne. The load, 10 meters long, 5 meters wide and 5 meters high, was towed on a truck specially designed for wide, heavy loads to the port of Strasbourg where it was put on a barge for Antwerp, Belgium. It was trans-shipped onto a freighter for the sea trip to St. Nazaire a few hundred meters from the project site. The power station is due to start operations in 2010 after a three-year construction period. Power output will be supplied to 250,000 homes south of Brittany.

Expansion plans at the adjacent LNG terminal, which supplies more than 15% of the French market, will see delivery capacity rise from the original 10 billion cubic meters per year to 16.5 billion cubic meters per year. In the first phase, 2.5 billion cubic meters per year will be added by early 2011 and in the second phase a further 4 billion cubic meters per year in 2014.

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