The ISP facility in Calvert City, KY is involved in the company’s largest business – specialty chemicals. Due to the company’s significant market share in this business and the role the facility in Calvert City plays in the company’s present status and future market share, it became necessary to evaluate this particular site with regard to the electrical power distribution system.

The site is over 30 years old, and has had various owners and experienced several stages of expansion and process modifications throughout those years, which meant the electrical power distribution system was expanded to handle new load only with no real investment in creating and providing for an overall and complete system. While this approach was adequate for a time and initially cost effective with respect to individual projects over the years it had become evident that the entire system needs attention in the areas of safety, reliability, infrastructure, maintenance, and capacity.

The next step involved using field investigation to essentially schematically design a system from the 13.2 KV service entrance gear down to the 480 volt level addressing the critical areas of safety, reliability, infrastructure, maintenance, and capacity.

The design scheme to improve the power distribution system included a looped primary-secondary selective system; high resistance grounds vs. ungrounded substations, a new arc resistant 15 kV service entrance switchgear and power monitoring system.

ISP challenged PCI’s design team to implement this improvement but a four-day plant outage was the maximum time allowed to swap out the plant electrical system. PCI functioned as a construction manager for the project, working closely with contractor, ISP engineering, and equipment manufactures to generate progress reports, approve shop drawings, and project scheduling. The new electrical distribution system was energized on the third day of the outage, providing for plant production a day ahead of schedule.

This 2.5 million-dollar project is allowing the ISP plant to operate safer, more reliable, with improved maintainability, and provisions for future expansion.