Outages are nothing new at a place like Holland Energy Plant.
But the ongoing outage, due to be completed next month, is a different sort of animal.
With three major projects, the 2025 outage at the natural gas facility co-owned by Hoosier Energy and Wabash Valley Power Alliance is easily the two-decade-old plant’s largest ever.
The projects consist of the steam turbine inspection, the gas turbine hot gas path inspection and both Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG) LP feed water heater tubebundle replacements.
The latter of that trio has been the headliner for not just months, but years ahead of a journey by ship from Thailand, across the Pacific Ocean, through the Panama Canal and finally arriving at Holland by truck.
“The LP water heater is taking care of some longstanding issues we’ve had both with the reliability of that unit as far as leaks, as well as some back pressure on the unit,” Holland plant manager Kent Schmohe said. “It’s been a three-year project in the making.”
It started with some old-fashioned paperwork as requests went through the Project Management Office (PMO).
“The coordination really started a few years ago when we put projects in for approval and made sure to get financing through the PMO group and the project management processes,” said Bob Barnes, Hoosier Energy’s Combined Cycle Operation Generation Manager. “We also had a lot of support from both Hoosier and Wabash when it comes to compliance. We were looking at air requirements and safety requirements while keeping the PMO involved, so a lot of collaboration to get this pushed through.”
During this recent three-plus-year timeframe, Holland has been setting records for itself – higher capacity, more operating time, fewer restarts. That made this outage even more important.
“The plant is running more now than what it has historically, and it’s also being tasked with trying to plan outages and projects, so that’s one opportunity for improvement that we’re seeing now is to engage the PMO team.”
With that done, the adventure began in earnest as the tube-bundle replacement, ordered via Nooter Eriksen, left Thailand. Barnes was able to track the ship each step of the way
“We got a ship ID number, and there are multiple websites out there where you can track maritime traffic,” Barnes said. “You can see where it’s at, get an idea of the weather and track which way it’s going.”
The original path for the shipment was to go north of Hawaii and then cut south, but instead it traveled south of Hawaii to skirt some storms.
“It’s normal that time of year, winter in the Pacific Ocean, that you’ll change course to go around some storms,” said Barnes, a Navy veteran.
Once the ship arrived in the Panama Canal, each lock had a webcam to view the ship’s transition.
All told, it was 12,700 miles and 26 days from Thailand to the port of Houston.
That was just the first leg of the journey. The final 879 miles from the port to the plant required special load semis pulling special trailers due to the size and weight of the bundles.
What was scheduled to be a four-day transit time turned out to be a week longer as loads shifted on the trailer and caused a one-week delay. That turned out to be fortuitous as Barnes found out that special permits and agreements were necessary with the state of Illinois and the local counties to get those heavy loads through the rural roads leading to the plant.
That made it even more of a relief once the bundles were inside the fence of the plant along with the crane needed to handle them.
“We couldn’t start tearing the current bundles out until the new bundles were loaded onto the semis on U.S. soil,” Hoosier Energy Director of Generation Strategy Cory Samm said. “If we started to tear those out, then the ship sank or got caught up in the Panama Canal or customs turned us back at the port, we could be down at the plant for several, several months.
“They’re on site, they’re getting installed, we’re putting it all back together – a big relief.”
That’s not to minimize the other key parts of the outage, which also required planning.
“Kent and his team put together schedules based on how long each job will take, keeping in mind manpower, how one job can impact another positively or negatively, so there’s a lot of coordination to get the work done in the time allocated,” Barnes said.
The steam turbine inspection is a significant project in its own right, something that has to be done every 10 years.
“It’s really a report card on how we operate and how things are going as far as steam quality and how we operate the plant,” Schmohe said.
After opening up the turbine and taking it to a shop in Milwaukee, the inspection found issues with the rotor and cracks in leads that would take more time and money than expected as Toshiba, the OEM, got things back up to speed.
“Any time you haven’t opened the equipment for several years, there’s always the risk of finding something, partly due to the age of the equipment and the cyclic stress,” Samm said.
Added Schmohe: “We took care of those (discoveries) to make sure the unit is going to stay reliable for the next 10 years.”
Last, but not least, is the hot gas path on gas turbine No. 2. That maintenance must be done every five years.
“We use GE for that work,” Schmohe said. “There were very few discovery items, but we took care of those, so it should be ready to run for the summer and years to come.”
To get to that point sometime in June requires a huge sacrifice from the plant staff. They started on the outage on March 7, and it will be more than three months of working 12-14 hours a day while working two straight weeks, taking a day off and working another two weeks straight.
“They’ve kept motivated, kept their morale up and those guys are pushing through with their dedication to the job and to the plant driving them to get done,” Barnes said. “There is an outstanding crew of operators and maintenance teams for Hoosier and Wabash working together while not getting the normal weekends off. Everyone will be glad for the plant to go back in operation and be running normally.”
The new normal for the Holland Energy Plant is running longer, harder and more productively. This outage will allow that to happen with some ancillary benefits.
“Working internally with Hoosier and Wabash teams, we’re coming out of this outage looking at ways to improve our operational efficiencies, reducing our long-term maintenance costs and cycling stress off the units,” Samm said.
