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Backup generator goes online at plant
(by Sue Reid - December 07, 2011)
Backup generator goes online at plant
By SUE REID
A small, yet crucial component of a nearly $5 million capital improvement project under way since last November at Solon's sewage treatment plant -- a backup generator -- was put on line last week.
Plant Director Paul Solanics said that the generator was one component of an anaerobic digester and electrical upgrade project at the plant.
It has been installed on the northwest portion of the plant at a cost of about $545,000 and was recently connected and tested "under load," Mr. Solanics explained. That is referring to the maximum amount of equipment that would be called on to perform at any given time. The generator ran the entire plant, Mr. Solanics noted. "That's huge."
"We have two separate feeds that come into the plant from two different substations," Mr. Solanics said. With the addition of the generator, the plant now has the ability to run in the event those two power feeds go down. In the 30 years he has been at the plant, Mr. Solanics said he has witnessed the two power feeds go down twice. Once was during an ice storm in 2000 and the second time, during a blackout a couple years later.
"You definitely don't want to go through that," he said.
In those instances where there is no power and no generator, "there's nothing you can do.
"The flow is coming in and going out without any treatment," Mr. Solanics said. "With a backup generator, we should never be in that situation."
There are already generators at 80 percent of the city's pump stations, and they provide the same backup service in case the power would go out. "We can still run the pump stations and prevent any pollution reaching the environment," he said.
Mr. Solanics said that the anaerobic digester project is about 85 percent complete. The first part of the project involved redoing the two digesters to be able to utilize the methane gas they produce to run equipment in the plant. The second part of the project was an electrical upgrade, which will result in a complete refurbishing of the high-voltage electrical system that powers the entire plant. All of the wiring, which is 30 years old, will be replaced as part of the project.
"The goal of the digester project was to improve the efficiency and performance of them and make better use of our methane gas," Mr. Solanics said. "In the past, we vetted gas off into the atmosphere. It's just useful energy that goes to waste, and now we will capture it and utilize it."
This project represents one of the larger capital improvement projects undertaken at the plant, although it is on par with others in the past in terms of cost. A trickling filter-aeration project was completed in 2004 at a cost of about $4.3 million.
Solon's sewage treatment plant, originally built in the 1960s, treats the majority of the waste water generated in the city, which is on average about 3.7 million gallons a day.
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