Keeping things safe during a safety upgrade

How do you keep your facility safe, while you’re servicing your safety equipment? This was the problem brought to us by one of the world’s largest petrochemical plants when they needed to upgrade their low voltage switchgear and Motor Control Centres (MCCs). The low voltage switchgear is there to make sure the plant teams can service machinery safely, while the MCCs help protect staff and equipment from risks like arc flash. With expensive downtime not an option, they needed a power system that would perform the same job on a temporary basis, keeping the plant safe and operational while the work was going on.

We make sure we get right under the skin of a project, finding out exactly what our customers need, especially for a job as complex and critical as this one. Our engineers joined the plant team’s planning sessions, getting to know the electrical layout, so we could design the right system for the job. This involved analysing the load requirements for each switchgear, building and creating an uninterruptible power package that would match load swings, exceed plant safety standards and meet National Electric Code (NEC) regulations.

Throughout the project, our proprietary Aggreko Remote Monitoring (ARM) service sent vitals and load data from our generators to our Remote Operations Centre (ROC) in real time. This gave our engineers a live view of how our equipment was performing, so they could pre-empt any issues, as well as analysing the data to spot best practices and cost savings for the future.

Thanks to our system, we carried out the electrical turnaround without any outages, which meant no loss to profits while the work was going on. The project was so successful that the team at the plant now call us whenever they're doing electrical maintenance work.