The Thorold Co-Gen

The job I am at right now is the Thorold Cogeneration Project close to Niagara Falls. I'm living out of a hotel, which pretty much sucks. If you don't mind spending a lot of money, living out of town can be fun, but it becomes easy to spend too much and find yourself stuck. Anyways according to the OPA (Ontario Power Authority) the Thorold Co-Gen is natural gas-fired 305 MW industrial cogeneration facility located in Thorold, Ontario. The project will be capable of burning high and low pressure natural gas, as well as landfill gas. In addition to electricity, the adjacent paper mill will receive steam produced by the cogeneration facility.

http://www.powerauthority.on.ca for more info

Working on this site is interesting, as always there are hassles about safety and break times and so on. The crew for the company I work for is at 35 men which is quite large for most job sites. As a crew we insulate and metal clad steam piping and water lines, as well as the large boilers and other major piping sections in the plant. The insulation thickness on this site is quite thick ranging from minimal at none and a half inches thick to heavy at six and a half inches thick, with up to three layers of mineral fiber insulation on it. This is as mention before to prevent energy loss through the steam pipes but it also helps with personal protection stopping burns as well as acoustic values, keeping the noise of the fast moving steam down.

Now this job is reaching its substantial completion date where most of the work is done and turned over to start up crews, who now run live steam and water through the finished lines testing them for leaks and defaults before the plant goes online and can produce power.

These Co-Gen stations are being built all over Ontario to help solve the issue of power dependency that we all learned about during the 2003 blackout of most of this province. These plants help fill a need that sees energy put onto our grid that doesn't come from out of Ontario. If you like to know more check out the links I posted.