Replacing diesel with battery power delivers cheaper and more environmentally friendly energy during turnarounds

The customer requested a traditional diesel generator setup to keep them powered during the turnaround. This incorporated a continuous 60 kW generator with a redundant backup and a fuel tank. The total cost of this application would be $15,000 per month for equipment and fuel – a considerable expense when each turnaround could last for several months.

As part of our consultive and partnership approach, we began to explore replacing the historical package with a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution. At the same time, it was critical that the new solution could provide the highest levels of reliability and safety throughout the turnaround in order to protect operations and staff.

We installed a hybrid solution consisting of a 30 kVA battery and just the backup generator to recharge it. Instead of running off diesel 24/7 as the old solution did, this would allow them to run off the battery for most of the time, only using diesel when the battery needed to be charged.

Our remote monitoring service (ARM) ensured that we pro-actively captured data throughout the project to guarantee safe and reliable operation. As well as enabling us to fix any issues before they affected performance, this data would give us valuable insights to help improve future performance.

The customer was estimated to spend over $9,000 per month on fuel, due to the diesel generator running 24/7. Running the generator for only 2-5 hours daily reduced fuel use to just $2,400 per month.

The maintenance costs were also much lower as when the generator was running 24/7 it needed to be brought down and maintained every two weeks. With much less usage as part of the hybrid system, this maintenance only needed to be carried out every nine weeks. Overall, this led to total savings of almost $8,000 per month.The data captured by ARM also enables us to carry out analysis that will lead to even greater savings in the future as we can improve the sizing or recommend alternative applications.

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