Louisville Gas and Electric’s Generating Station in Trimble County KY is their newest power generating facility. The facility is located on the Ohio River west of Bedford and 50 miles northeast of Louisville. The Trimble county facility has one clean burning 547MW generating unit that went into service in 1990, and six simple cycle gas turbines with a rated capacity of 153 MW that were commissioned 2002-2004. In 1999 and again in 2002 LG&E received the J.D. Power and Associates Award for electric producers, placing first among the nation’s largest electric utilities. Power quality, reliability, price and value of electric service, and corporate image in their community were among the criteria that won LG&E this honor.

In planning for a significant generating upgrade, PCI was LG&E’s engineer of choice to upgrade current Unit 1 station control systems. PCI generated a tight and inclusive bid specification, developed replacement strategies, participated in vendor evaluations, and developed scope of work documentation. LG&E and PCI encouraged early involvement of plant maintenance, production, and leadership in the control vendor selection. Vendor evaluations are complete and vendor selection is imminent. The upfront effort and cooperation between all parties will ensure a successful project.

The PCI Control Specification and scope documentation define vendor deliverables in great detail to facilitate tight cost control.

The project controls philosophy is to provide a single control system design to operate all site generating units, shared process equipment, and environmental units safely and efficiently over the generating unit’s entire operating range. Accurate system documentation is being developed and completed early in the project cycle to ensure a quality installation, seamless acceptance and successful start-up.

LG&E, PCI, and the successful vendor will engineer and install new redundant controllers, operator stations, workstations, data collection systems, HART intelligent field devices, and Advanced controls software.

The Scope of work includes Boiler and Turbine Control, Burner Management System, Scrubber, Data Acquisition, Ash Handling, Coal Handling and miscellaneous Balance of Plant systems.

By the end of this project, over 17,000 I/O points will have been engineered, installed and controlled. The project will be managed in phases with completion of first phase in the fall of 2007, and the balance of the project completed by fall of 2009.