Hydro Review - June 2017

www.potenciaindustrial.com.mx POTENCIA INDUS TRIAL, S. A.

Av. Año de Juarez 205

Granjas San Antonio Mexico City, D.F. 09070

+52 ( 55) 5686.7303

+52 ( 55) 5686.7246 sales@potenciaindustrial.com.mx

Established in 1958, Potencia Industrial ofers engineering and manufacturing of special application high-efciency electrical motors, generators, M-G sets and power systems. Foro ver thirty years we have dedicated to the advance of rotary electrical machinery technologies, constantly setting new industry benchmarks. We provide creative solutions that meet and exceed the toughest technical requirements while maintaining the highest reliability and efciency.

Nearly 90% of our production was destined for the U.S. and Canada in the last 5 years; we delivered equipment equivalent to 2,000 MW of wind power, 60 MW of hydroelectric power and 100 MW of industrial electric capacity. Our state of the art hydrogenerators, installed at several hydro sites around the world, are custom built, suitable for Pelton, Francis or Kaplan turbines, vertical or horizontal, for high, low or variable speed.

Built to Spec

High Reliability Low Maintanence Very High Efciency Life-Long Service Up to 20 MW

Induction Synchronous Permanent Magnet

Generator Types:

Visit us at

HydroVision International 2017 Booth #1243

52 HYDRO REVIEW / June 2017 www.hydroworld.com up the waterway is the frst priority. Equally important, though, is the responsibility to communicate with stakeholders in an honest and open way, to explain how the incident happened and the steps you have taken to remediate it and to avoid such an event from happening again in the future. Overall, the response from an oil leak requires many hours, external response teams, and interactions with agency personnel to resolve.

For more than 125 years, our company has been committed to protecting the environment, so when the 2009 incident occurred we took swift action to report the leak to the responsible agencies, clean up the spill, repair the damaged transformer and enhance our spill containment defenses to prevent such a leak from happening again.

After the cleanup was completed, the
Avista engineers involved in the response,
including myself, began discussing whether
anything could be done to make the oil itself
less toxic. “What if we switched to an oil that
was nontoxic to native species and people?
What if we switched to an oil that was bio-
degradable, so that even in the unfortunate
event of a spill, it would pose no harm to the
environment or people?”
Even if it could be done, we knew that
fnding or developing an oil that ft these
requirements would in no way absolve us from
our responsibility to devote every efort to
prevent leaks from happening in the frst place.
Avista always strives to go above and beyond
the environmental laws and regulations and
to conduct business in a way that honors the
integrity of the natural resources in the areas
we serve. Our goal was to signifcantly reduce
the potential environmental consequences
from any future oil spill. Use of an environ-
mentally-friendly oil would not alter Avista’s
processes and protocols for responding to a
leak, but it could greatly change the impact
a leak could have on the waterway and sur-
rounding areas.

We considered transformer oil and realized that the special dielectric properties would present some challenges. It was at this time that we discovered an opportunity to replace petroleum-based oil in our hydro plants: the governor systems.

Investigating the opportunity

Low-pressure hydraulic governor systems — as well as other hydraulic systems in hydropower plants — require a signifcant quantity of oil: thousands of gallons, in some cases. In this application, the oil is primarily used for hydraulic power transmission and lubrication, not for heat transfer or electrical insulation. Te idea of replacing hundreds or even thousands of gallons of petroleum-based oil with biodegradable oil, with no loss in plant performance or durability, had merit to our engineers.

As we began this work, we knew Avista did not have adequate research and development personnel or facilities to move forward on our own. We would need help. So we enlisted the aid of Washington State University’s Applied Sciences Laboratory ( WSU ASL) in Spokane to research alternative hydraulic fuids that would reduce the risk to the environment, should an unplanned release of hydraulic fuid occur in one of our hydroelectric stations.