EM - June/July 2014 - (Page 12)

12 12 June/July GENERATION2014WHOLESALE MARKETS & * www.esb.ie/em June/July 2014 * www.esb.ie/em Generation & Wholesale Markets Happy 40th Anniversary Turlough Hill! iversary of This month marks the 40th ann pumped operations starting at Ireland's only h Hill. On storage system - ESB Turloug t to say behalf of everyone at ESB, I wan colleagues congratulations and thank you to ent involved in building, both past and pres ion. It's operating and maintaining the stat strong tradition part of our history and the ESB, and of sustainable innovation at ination and it's an incredible feat of imag tinued to engineering. Turlough Hill has con ing sure play a strong role ever since in mak ents, day in we meet our customers' requirem and day out. Here's to the next 40 years! Kind regards, Paddy Hayes Executive Director Generation & Wholesale Markets. SINCE IT'S THE 40th anniversary of ESB Turlough Hill, it seems like a good time to flash back and celebrate how it came to be... ELECTRICITY FOR AN EXPANDING ECONOMY By the late 1960s, ESB had been steadily supplying electricity to customers for over 40 years. At that point, we knew that electricity demand would continue growing across Ireland. We knew we needed to be responsive and flexible to help manage that demand. And we knew we wanted to be as environmentally conscious as possible in whatever we developed next for existing and future generations. Designing and developing a pumpedstorage hydro station was a unique and innovative civil engineering solution for Ireland at the time - expanding the electricity supply for a growing population through an environmentallyfriendly system. Plus, it would provide flexibility when it came to handling peaks and troughs in demand throughout any given day, which is always a challenge. You can't store electricity for very long and large power stations can take hours to fire up before they are working at full capacity. Pumped storage, however, can go from standstill to full capacity/generation in around 70 seconds. Having a rapidly responsive resource like this as part of the generation mix would be a huge advantage to customers across Ireland at peak electricity demand times. The Hydro Control Centre today at Turlough Hill. Excavation work being carried out on the massive engineering project which commenced in 1968. DID YOU KNOW? 'Turlough' is the Gaelic name for a dry lake - one which loses its water through a swallow hole in dry weather. GETTING STARTED Our engineers started looking for the right location in County Wicklow, which features plenty of mountains and lakes, plus it's also fairly close to one of Ireland's main centres of demand - Dublin. Eventually, the team settled on Turlough Hill because it already had a natural corrie lake - Lough Nahagahan - which could become the lower reservoir for the station. There was also a suitable site on the mountain where we could build an artificial upper reservoir. DID YOU KNOW? Turlough Hill is located 60km south of Dublin in the Wicklow Mountains close to Glendalough which is the second most visited tourist site in Ireland. With the site decided and with approval from the Government, we started work on the construction phase in the autumn of 1970, supported by many staff from different areas of expertise across ESB, as well as contractors, to bring the project to life. DIGGING IN If you take a look at the diagram below, you'll see why the project really caught the public's imagination at the time - it was the country's first (and, so The first unit went live in 1973. The remaining three have been operating since 1974. far, only) pumped storage station and there hadn't been anything quite like it in terms of scale since the Shannon Scheme was built in the 1920s. TAKING CARE ESB was always very conscious that we were working in an area of outstanding natural beauty and wanted to make sure we minimised our impact wherever possible. As mentioned earlier, the main station was buried out of sight, inside the mountain, but ESB also: * successfully used a pioneering (at the time) technique to restore grass growth on the verges of the newlyconstructed two-mile long road to the mountain top, using a mix of water, fertiliser, wood pulp, peat moss and grass seed; * used the 1.305 million cubic metres of granite excavated from the upper reservoir to build its embank- 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Pump Turbine Motor/Generator Main Unit Tranformer Flap Gate Turbine Inlet Valve Pony Motor/Generator 10 kV Switchgear, Control Panels and Relays. 8. 2 x 70 ton Bridge Cranes 9. False Roof with Soundproofing 10. Haunch Beams 11. 50 ton Bridge Crane 12. Cable Gallery for 220 kV Cables ment (maximum height: 34m, length: 1,445m); * made sure that the administration offices and transformer compound can't be seen from the Wicklow Gap road. ALL SYSTEMS GO! In December 1973, ESB Turlough Hill's first generating unit started operating, followed by the three other units in the summer of 1974. And this incredible feat of civil engineering has been supplying Ireland with electricity ever since. In 2004, ESB Turlough Hill became the Hydro Control Centre (HCC) for the company. This means that we can operate any of our 10 hydro stations direct from one single control room on site - increasing our responsiveness to customer needs even further. n The construction team worked hard over six years: * carving out a massive underground chamber inside the granite mountain to house the main station, so that it would be hidden from view (length 82m, breadth 23m, heigh 28m - the same space as a medium-sized cathedral); * excavating 2.5 million tonnes of rock to build the upper lake, then lining it with asphaltic concrete; * drilling tunnels through the rock to connect the station and the upper/lower lakes.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of EM - June/July 2014

EM - June/July 2014
Contents
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EM - June/July 2014