Sinclair Knight Merz was engaged by Pilbara Energy Pty Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of BHP Minerals Pty Ltd, to carry out the design and project management of a major new power station development in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The project involved the construction of two new gas-turbine power stations at Newman and Port Hedland which provide an independent supply of power to BHP’s mining, processing and shipping operations in the Pilbara.
Both stations have an installed capacity of 105 MW, each having three Frame 6 gas turbine units, and run totally unattended. The automation of power generation at Newman and Hedland presented several challenges to the control systems engineers at Sinclair Knight Merz.
The control of Newman power station was complicated by frequent short term load swings. The control system continually examines the station operating regime ensuring it will meet the expected load profiles. The power generated at Hedland is transmitted to the BHP load centres over Western Power transmission lines. This required strict power and energy management to avoid unwanted and expensive energy interchange. The control system continually monitors BHP’s power demand and precisely matches power generation to it.
Typically the control and power management systems comprise intelligence distributed throughout the power stations and BHP load centres. Standard industrial programmable logic controllers and fibre-optic cables provide the core of the control systems with Telstra high speed data communications to remote sites at Hedland.