International Cooling Tower (ICT) recently successfully completed a turnkey turnaround project for a 1,000-plus-megawatt gas power plant. With a 10-week timeline, ICT was able to provide full demolition, debris hauling and electrical services for the wood-to-fibre- reinforced-plastic tower rebuild. The tower was a 146,000-gallon-per-minute, 10-cell counter-flow tower.
The turnaround for the gas turbine system began in late January. ICT created a detailed schedule to align plant resources and its execution team, consisting of the tower rebuild, electrical and demolition/ haul teams. ICT’s ability to synchronize all of the subcontracted resources under its turnkey contract allowed for the effective management of multiple parallel workflows while also mitigating the risk of shared resource/work system overlap.
On day one of the turnaround, the unit turbine entered a full seven-day passive cooldown period that utilized passive (non-mechanically assisted) cooling tower water, which allowed for the postponement of the rebuild phase by a full week. ICT worked diligently with plant safety and electrical teams to lockout tagout the necessary mechanical systems to gain a head start on the disassembly of mechanical components. By day two of the cooldown period, ICT’s electrical subcontractor was also able to gain an advantage on line rollups and motor control center building termination points. At the end of the seventh day for the cooldown period, ICT had the immediate ability to fly down components and finish electrical termination. This timeline coincided with basin cleanout, which allowed for the compression of the pre-demolition schedule to only two days. ICT carefully created a thorough safety plan to have crane activities occurring at different ends of the tower, away from basin cleanout activities.
ICT also performed the demolition scope of the project, which included the basin cleanout, tower demolition, debris cleanout and hauling of debris. Not only did ICT handle the physical activities of this scope, but it also managed the demolition and dust permitting requirements for the county and hauling manifests for landfill debris. In addition to the time/ budget control benefits of diligent turnkey management, this allowed the customer to free up more of its own resources rather than being buried in project paperwork.
Finally, when it comes to accounting resources, the ICT turnkey project management team removed the customer’s resource need to create invoices for multiple companies at multiple phases of the project. With resource control for scheduling, the ability to manage parallel work paths and simplified billing, ICT’s turnkey project management team focuses on the culture of effectively solving client turnaround resource issues.
For more information, visit www.ictower.com or call (832) 780-6900.
