COMMISSIONER RUIZ: Yeah, thank you. Frank Ruiz, here. This question has two parts, and I’m trying to put it in layman terms so that everyone can understand. You were referring as these form of energy
as one of the most not just consistent, but reliable. And so, the question is, what can interrupt, you know, this this really reliable form of electricity? Especially as, you know, it will continue to increase, because of lithium extraction.
And the second is, if it is reliable 24/7, and in 360 days, how many of those dates, you know, is this energy running, right? Because you had mentioned that this is a very corrosive, that you know, way of, extracting energy, and it requires a lot of maintenance.
MR. TURNER: I’ll answer the second question first.
COMMISSIONER RUIZ: Okay.
MR. TURNER: So
the second question about reliability. To give you an example, and I’ll use CalEnergy because that’s the most familiar with the history there. In the early days, Magma Power made all their plants out of carbon steel. Unocal made one plant with expensive alloy materials, and there were two different thoughts on how to have what we call high operating factors, in other words the plant is up running full speed for as
many days as you can.
And the right answer was probably a mix of what those two companies were doing. You want to have alloy material and you monitor the chemistry. These plants typically, when we do a financial model when we’re developing a plant out here at the Salton Sea, I think most of use 95 percent of the time, it’s up running at a 100 percent output in our model.
With good operating procedure, good maintenance procedure, and you have built that plant out of good materials, not just carbon steel, these plants really run probably better than 98 percent of the time. And a lot of that is because of the training of the people who operate and maintain. Their experience and their expertise go a long way to have that kind of an operational excellence.
Because of the corrosive nature of the brine, we do have to take these plants down a certain amount of time typically every year would be a plan. It might be a long weekend just to check. But every two to four years or so, we would typically take these plants down for anywhere from a today what we call a turnaround. We'd shut them all the way down, we take everything out of all the vessels, get in there, check the vessels for how they are, clean them up, make
repairs, that type of a thing, start the plant back up.
So, we’ve learned that over the years, and the and the most important is, train people well. Get them the tools and the resources they need to do what they do best operating and maintaining these plants, and then obviously build the plants out of the right materials, and they practically run themselves. It's really this kind of the same scenario as I mentioned with the reservoir where you learn your lessons, you apply your lessons, and you hire and train people to, you know, do an excellent job.
Now I forgot what the first question was.
COMMISSIONER RUIZ: What are the bigger challenges
to the production?
MR. TURNER: I can tell you it’s not earthquakes. People think that it could be, because, you know, the earth moves, and we have lots of wells down in here. But our experience out here, and John can correct me for recent experience if I’m incorrect here, is that we typically don’t see a change in the production or the injection capability in the wells. On the surface, all the years that I ran CalEnergy, only
one time did one earthquake trip a plant offline. And I forget what year that was, but it was the Elmore plant, and the epicenter was fairly close to it. Didn’t trip the rest of the plants out there, but it tripped that one. Didn’t cause damage, but the way these generators and turbines are built and designed, they have vibration monitors on them, because these are big masses that are spinning. So, we have vibration managers in that we typically set very sensitive, so if we get a vibration that is outside, they should, it will shut the turbine or the generator down, you know, as a protection means.
And so, earthquakes aren’t it. Typically, it would be operator error. If we had a shutdown where maybe a pH, which is a measure of how acid or basic they the material is. If that control feature gets out of whack it could cause the plant to shut down. But again, the training that goes on at these plants is such that that’s pretty rare. And that’s one of the main reasons why we see these high operating factors.
If you go to the old Magma plants, I mentioned they’re all being originally made out of carbon steel. There have been upgrades over the years, but it’s not quite the same as if you’d build a highly alloyed plant in the beginning. And so those are probably the
toughest ones to operate and maintain at those high levels. But they do operate at pretty high levels from everything that I’ve seen. And even the most the oldest plant out here that Unocal built, it went commercial in1982, it’s still running today. Not made out of a lot of alloy material, but again, that’s a testament to the guys and women that are running it. So, years of operation is pretty dog-gone good track record.
