MooseJawToday.com went on a guided tour of the Great Plains Power Station site to find out what the various structures will become and how the plant will eventually work, and spoke with some of the Moose Jaw workers employed there.

Brodie Andrei is a site services worker from Moose Jaw. He’s employed by Allan Construction out of Saskatoon.

“This is my first industrial construction job,” Andrei said. He added that it’s been a learning curve, but the people are knowledgeable and easy to work with. “With Burns & McDonnell, getting my foot in the door, there’s lots of opportunity there.”

Andrei said he’s hoping to be hired on with SaskPower once the plant goes operational. The scale of the construction has been overwhelming and impressive, but it’s very exciting, he added.

The various structures being erected on the site are enormous and tend to have dedicated purposes. A lot goes into producing 350 megawatts (mW) of power.

The switchyard is an essential component of the power station. It is a complex assembly of switches, power circuits, breakers, and more that acts as a controller to connect the power plant to the power grid.

A switchyard functions as a giant filter, emergency circuit breaker, transformer, surge arrestor, isolator, and fault analyzer. If the power generated by the station is a flood, the switchyard acts to tame that flood into a usable, controlled flow, entering the power grid where and how it is needed.

Although plant workers continuously monitor operations, the switchyard is set up as mechanically as possible, meaning that it can handle most requirements automatically, like an automatic transmission.

Russell Shropshire works for Burns & McDonnell as a field quality inspector. The number of inspections at the site is overwhelming. Every rivet, weld, piece of equipment, and concrete pour is inspected before, during, and after by a series of experts.

“Basically, any work that happens out there, I inspect it to make sure it was done properly and up to all our standards and specifications,” he explained. “And then, I review quality documents from the subcontractors. So, any work they do, there’ll be paperwork that follows along with it, documenting everything from date and time to materials placed.”

Shropshire is from Moose Jaw. He has two young daughters, whom he’s raising on a farm just west of the city. He’s confident the economic effect of the power plant will give a lasting boost to the area.

“Power stations are huge,” he said. “Everything from hotels to rental units and, of course, bars and restaurants. … Gyms are more full, grocery stores are more full.”

This building will house the offices and control interfaces for the plant. The other buildings are constructed exclusively for their equipment; workers shouldn’t need to be in the turbine buildings regularly.

These structures function to safely contain the enormous power-generating turbines that are the heart of the plant.

The gas turbine (GTG, building 5 in the illustration) is the first stop. Natural gas flows into this building to be burned in the Siemens SGT6-5000F heavy-duty gas turbine. That turbine creates steam, spinning a shaft that drives a generator and producing approximately 260 megawatts (mW) of electricity.

The steam is then routed through the heat recovery steam generator (HRSG, building 6), which is similar to the switchyard in that it mechanically conditions the steam to be usable in a second turbine.

That steam turbine (STG, building 4) then drives another generator, producing a potential additional 100 mW of electricity.

The south side of the completed power plant (labelled “1” on the photo above) will house an enormous air-cooled condenser (ACC). The condenser is a series of pipes, cooling fins, and fans that will drop the temperature of the steam used in power generation to the point where it can be safely returned to a storage tank to be recycled through the system.

The water used must be purified on site, to the point where it is so pure it would damage anyone who drank it. This is to avoid any kind of mineral build-up in the thousands of miles of pipes the station uses. Build-up is dangerous because it changes the tolerances of the pipes. A smaller pipe can’t handle as much heat — and increases system pressure.

Nicole Geddes works for Quorex Construction as their safety and site administrator. Originally from Regina, Geddes has lived in Moose Jaw for 12 years after being on the project team that built the Dr. F.H. Wigmore Regional Hospital.

“When they were hiring (for the Great Plains Power Station), it aligned with my previous employment, and I thought it would be a cool, cool job,” Geddes said. “It’s a big piece of the industrial park, so for years to come, every time I drive my kids anywhere, I can be like, Mom helped build that.”

Geddes’ work is a lot like Shropshire’s: she handles the paperwork for the daily safety paperwork each Quorex subcontractor must submit. Work clearances, scaffold structure assessments, and necessary qualifications are all required before workers even step on site.

Geddes said she can see how Moose Jaw is benefiting from the project. She thinks most residents don’t realize how business is brought to the city.

“I’m constantly buying supplies in town. I’m always at Rona when we run out of safety equipment or even just paper. Canadian Tire, Western Lumber, Castle Lumber, so we’re just injecting money into the local economy.”

One of her favourite things about working on the site is the number of women involved. Everyone gets treated the same, Geddes said, which is awesome.