Fixin a hole

One of the things we did here before all the painting was to dig a hole for a "platform" foundation. It looks like a deck or a porch to me but it's made of steel so it needs a more macho name. :)


This platform replaces a temporary one that got put in over the winter. The door with the sign on it in the picture allows people to go into the new radiator room where extra heat from the new generators gets sent.

Pretty much the entire station is run off JP-8 jet fuel which is similar to diesel. All of the generators on station and heavy equipment are run with standard diesel engines that have been "derated" meaning they don't work quite as well or provide as much power as they would with normal diesel fuel. This is a trade off but with 60% of the fuel on station being used by aircraft it makes sense since only one type of fuel needs to be brought in on the yearly tanker ship.

So in the old power plant about 18% of the energy in each gallon of diesel is turned into electricity is turned into electricity and the rest becomes "waste" heat. This seems horrifically inefficient but it's pretty standard for diesel engines, especially diesel engines that were built the year my parents got married.
This "waste" heat isn't all wasted, however. The Glycol (antifreeze) that is pumped through the engines here dumps the waste heat into another giant loop of pipe which brings the heat around town to the dorms, the galley, and the work centers. By using this heat the buildings have to run their own boilers (like the one I cleaned last week) less and they save enough fuel to make installing the system cost-effective.

Our new power plant's engines have better controls and 28 years of better engineering in them so they are about 24% efficient. Waste heat is going to be collected from the engine coolant like in the old power plant but also from the exhaust which will mean that much more "waste" heat can be harnessed to heat the town.

So getting back to the picture. The radiator room has two large radiators not unlike the one in your car that will cool the engine coolant if there isn't demand for enough of it in town. During the winter all of the waste heat will go toward heating town but when we get into the "warmer" summer months all the heat from making the electricity on station will be more than enough to heat all the buildings hooked up to the waste heat loop.

Installing the platform meant we had to take out the old one. Which meant I was driving a pickle (forklift) to hold the old platform up while my fellow GA Matt used the cutting torch to cut through the supports.

For the next two weeks we dug a hole for the concrete footings that you see at the bottom of the picture. Digging holes here goes slowly because all the dirt is frozen into place so we had a big heater to melt the ice. We would set up the heater to run for a few hours then run outside and shovel as fast as we could before the dirt refroze. We could usually get up to six inches deep before we had to set the heater back up and reheat the ground. Finally a crane came in to drop the footings in and some welders put the new platform together. It's a lot of work considering nobody should need to go in the room when everything is working. But with the thawing and freezing of the ground around here we have to make sure the footings go deep enough to not shift the building.