Hydro shuts down Jenpeg

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This article was published 02/07/2010 (5576 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

 Manitoba Hydro has shut down a dam after a European engineer alerted Hydro’s staff to possible cracks in the plant’s underwater turbines.

Hydro has already found cracks on one turbine at the 30-year-old Jenpeg dam in northern Manitoba. Now, the other five turbines will be inspected, a tricky process that will take at least a month.

Jenpeg’s shutdown costs Hydro $100,000 a day in lost power. But it’s one of the Crown company’s smallest plants, so Hydro won’t have to renege on any export contracts and there will be plenty of electricity for the province, said Hydro spokesman Glenn Schneider.

Hydro engineers are hoping for a simple fix, but the worst-case scenario could see Jenpeg off-line for years. If it turns out the turbines need to be replaced, that means a long wait for new ones to be manufactured — likely in Europe — transported, assembled and installed. When the turbines were first purchased from a Soviet-run manufacturer in the mid-1970s, it was a four-year process.

The same Soviet company, based in the city then known as Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — sold turbines to the massive Iron Gate dam on the Danube River. Several years ago, two of that dam’s 16 turbines failed. One propeller broke free, damaging the dam’s internal works and causing flooding.

Early last month, a European engineer who worked at Iron Gate and knew Jenpeg was the only dam in North America with similar, Soviet-made turbines, sought out Hydro’s engineers at a conference overseas. So serious was the European engineer’s warning, Hydro shut Jenpeg down almost immediately about two weeks ago. Last week, Hydro’s engineers inspected the first turbine and found many cracks, about half a centimetre deep, on the shaft near the propellers — a part of the turbine that’s hard to get at and not normally inspected. Engineers are usually more concerned with the end of the shaft that’s closer to the power-making equipment, said Schneider.

It’s early days, but engineers believe they can grind out the cracks and coat the shaft to prevent new cracks.

"It’s not something that’s an imminent problem, but it could be a precursor," said Schneider. "The initial response was ‘Yeah, this is fixable.’ "

While that’s underway, each of the other five turbines will be disassembled and inspected.

Schneider says it’s too early to tell whether the other turbines have any damage or whether any will need to be replaced. That would be an expensive proposition at a time when Hydro is facing more than $16.5 billion in capital spending over the next decade to build three new power plants up north, the Bipole III power line down the province’s west side and several other smaller projects.

Hydro’s regulators have expressed pointed concern over the company’s debt load and the impact the building spree will have on the hydro rates homeowners pay.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca