- 5 th of September, 2005
Last week was a very interesting week for me. I had to opportunity to visit a few interesting places in Melbourne so I made a good week of it. I decided to stop over at Halls Gap on the way through to Melbourne. As most know, Halls gap is in the centre of a very beautiful place called the Grampians were days can be spent just exploring and looking at waterfalls. The picture is off the biggest waterfall in the Grampians, Mackenzie Falls. On the way back up a very nice Kookaburra posed for photos. I wished I could take this little guy home, but I have enough at home!
I had never been to Reeds lookout, so up I went. You can drive right up, way too easy. There is no fun it that! In the middle of nowhere is the Reeds lookout fire command tower with lots of antennas. I was more interested in the nice solar panel array that runs the building!
That night in Halls Gap was my first big test of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). We now have a VoIP box connected to our ADSL router here at home. My brother brought it to play with and there is this great company offering a VoIP public gateway service for Free! Yes free! It now cost a local call, but that even a great deal. So what does this all mean? Well in Halls Gap, I just happen to walk pass a Telstra pay phone. I was able to pickup the phone and dial a 1800 number to connect through to home, all for no connection cost. The call quantity was excellent and all it costs us was some bandwidth which you could consider free, as we have a 2GB per month limit for ADSL that we don’t normally overrun. This was one excellent service. Info on the Australian PSTN to Voice Over IP Gateway
- 7th of September, 2005
Today was the main reason form the trip. I was going to see the Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited (CFCL), R&D factory in Noble Park, Melbourne. CFCL are producing prototype Solid Oxide Fuel Cells for stationary combined heat and power (micro CHP) units. These prototype units run from natural gas and produce electricity and heat using the fuel cell. The micro CHP fuel cell is quite and very efficient. A normal coal power station is about 30% efficient in converting coal into electricity, the rest of the energy is wasted in heat. So why not put the power station into the home! This way we can produce the electricity and use the excess heat to heat hotwater and the house. This also reduces the average 10% power lost through transmitting electricity 100’s of kilometres around the country. Years down the track, why run expensive power lines into each house when we could just run a gas main. This would mean just one energy bill and no more paying a quarterly connection fee for both electricity and gas. Sounds Great!
Fuels Cells are nothing new, we have been doing this in Australia for years. Just look at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney. This phosphoric acid fuel cells powers the Technology Park with 200KW’s of electricity while providing the site with pure water from the fuel cell stack. The fuel cell has a 40% thermal efficiency and a 40% electrical efficiency, therefore giving an overall efficiency near 80%. That’s better than any coal station! The heat energy is used to heat hot water for a nearby hotel. This fuel cell has a life of 20years, but requires a new stack each 5 to 7 years.
http://www.cheresources.com/ausseycellzz.shtml
The photo on the left is the CFCL factory and offices. The photo on the right is of Thermo Electron Corp, a company that produce spectrophotometers and other high-tech instruments that we use at Flinders University. Thermo just happen to be directly across the road from CFCL.
Ceramic Fuels Cell Limited has a very impressive 8000 square metres of R&D production facilities in Melbourne employing 100 staff. CFCL produce the fuel cell stacks directly from raw materials (ie. zirconia for the ceramics) to make sure quality control is perfect. After all this is still very much a research process. The place was a maze of chemistry labs and clean rooms very busy with staff producing ceramic stacks. The photos inside the labs were thanks to CFCL, as cameras were not allowed to protect the intellectual property. I was given the tour by John Rajoo, the Chief Operations Officer. I was very interested in handling a electrolyte plate (wafer) and see first-hand how it was made. There was labs for everything, anode and cathode ink preparation, ceramic firing, laser cutting of the ceramic electrolyte plates, screen printing of anode and cathodes, and extensive testing. Ceramic Fuel Cells - Technology
Out the back was the testing stations shown in the picture, each station can test a 150W fuel cell stack during the testing phase. It was a little disappointing to see only a few stacks on the testers, but I can’t expect everything. CFCL claim they have the largest amount of solid oxide fuel cell testing stations in one location in the world. Yes they have lots of them! Look, the software was written in LabVIEW. Currently the stack life is around 4000 hours or about half a year. Not good when you would have to replace them twice a year. The goal is to gain a 5 year operation life for the stack. The stack will be a consumable item that will be replaced.
There was also two prototype fuel cell units getting built and tested. The unit is the same as the one pictured above on the right. These units contained the hot water tanks for the complete heat and power experience! The bottom of the unit contain a SLA battery bank that allows the unit to start up and produce electricity if not connected to the grid. John states the unit current take 20hours to get up the temperature.
I wish to thank the whole team at Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited for the tour and specially John and Peter. Be sure to checkout the wealth of information at Ceramic Fuel Cells Homepage
After this advanced look at the future, it was off to Latrobe Valley, 165 kilometres east of Melbourne. I have always been keen to have a tour of Loy Yang A power station. This is Victoria’s largest power station generating a massive 2.1 GigaWatt per hour of electricity and directly employing over 500 people. As like everything these days, strictly no photos or phones. I could be taking photos to blow the place up!!
We first had a drive around the massive open cut mine where dredger 16, one of the largest dredgers in the world was sitting idle. It weighs over 5000 tonne and stands 50metres high. The Loy Yang Mine supplies coal to both Loy Yang A and B power stations and is Australia’s largest coal mine. Loy Yang A consumes on average 60,000 tonnes of coal per day. That means around 41.7 tonnes of coal is required each minute. On Average 200,000 tonnes of coal is require each day to power all the stations in the Latrobe Valley.
Next was a drive around the power station to have a look at the cooling towers. There are four generators requiring four boilers and four cooling towers. On this day unit 4 had been shut down since the 2nd, for turbine nozzle attachment repairs. All units have been taken off line this year after cracks were found in the nozzles. You can see in the photo that steam is not produced from cooling tower 4(right side). The cooling towers are 114 metres high and has two pumps, pumping 5100 litres per second each.
Walking into the main building we noticed a Toyota Prius in the car park. Looks like they do care for the environment! The main foyer is just like a bank, one big room with the elevators and two models of the power station on display. It was a quick trip up a few floors to walk passed the control and relay rooms. The first thing I notice is the age of the control panels and relay room. OK it was built in 1984! It was then off for a quick look at the bottom of the boilers. The furnace run at 1000 degrees C and is hot! The turbines and generators were a little disappointing. Not a lot to see as they just sit there in a big room running at 3000RPM. The stator windings are made from hollow pipe flowing with distilled water for cooling. The windings for each generator are 100KM long. The internal generator casing is cooled by hydrogen.
It was time for a trip up to the 19th floor to the top of the boilers. Yes the boilers are 105 metres high! Each one has 485 kilometres of tube to heat the water. It was an excellent view from this floor looking over the coal mine. We were just about level with the top of the cooling towers. I would highly recommend a tour of the power station to anyone not afraid of heights!
Facts on the power station can be found here.
Loy Yang Power - Mining Facts
Loy Yang power - Generation Facts
Loy Yang Power - Main Website
Tuesday was a big day for International Power’s Hazelwood power station. The state government made the decision to extend the life of the power station by 25 years. Hazelwood built in 1964, produces 1600MW of power as is listed as the worlds most-polluting major coal-fired power station. Lots of ‘suites’ were present at the power works conference rooms on the Wednesday.
