Lower Colorado River Authority's (LCRA's) Lost Pines Power Park (LPPP) is located in central Texas, 30 miles southeast of Austin. The site hosts two separate facilities that provide distinctly different services to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) generation market. One is the Sim Gideon Power Plant (SGPP, Figure 1), a three-unit, 650-MW natural gas–fired steam plant whose forte is ancillary (load-regulation) services; the other is the Lost Pines 1 Power Project (LP1, Figure 1), a conventional 545-MW gas-fired combined-cycle plant.
1. Two plants, one site. Lost Pines Power Park comprises the three gas-fired steam units of Sim Gideon Power Plant, built in the 1960s (top), and the seven-year-old Lost Pines 1 combined-cycle plant (bottom). A single staff operates both facilities. Courtesy: LCRA
POWER, in its June 2007 issue, profiled the control system upgrades of the three SGPP units that made them among the fastest responders in ERCOT despite their advanced ages: 35, 39, and 42. LP1, a 2 x 1 plant, began generating and selling electricity in May 2001. GenTex Power Corp., an LCRA affiliate, built the Lost Pines facility in an equal partnership with Calpine Corp. in 2001. Two years later, LCRA purchased the remaining half of the facility, becoming its sole owner.
Mind meld
A single plant staff was formed in February 2006 by merging the employees of both plants. The first order of business: find a way to effectively manage and efficiently operate an integrated facility at which each plant is operated independently. One of the principal challenges was to bridge the gaps between the facilities' operator and technician experience bases (steam vs. gas turbine) and ages (new vs. 40 years old).
Integration of the two facilities' control and communications networks at a fundamental level required not just a meticulous look at their wires and pipes but also consideration of issues such as:
- Personnel safety.
- How the two plants should talk to each other and share data to support routine O&M activities.
- Using the integrated control network to provide backup for the two separate control rooms for operating and training purposes. Overtime cost savings were the desired benefit of leveraging operations staff in this way.
- Enabling operator mobility by supporting field data logging.
However ambitious these goals appear, the transition to a fully integrated O&M staff began with determining the basics of how its members were to communicate. Let's start at the beginning.
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