Marchwood Power: 24 Hour Emergency Call-out

Generation

Approximately 895 megawatts of electricity to the national grid.
 

Situation

An emergency call came into ECS’s 24-hour helpline, relating to a gas fault on one of the power station’s main generators. The station powers up to a million homes so there are huge implications for the surrounding area if system faults are not addressed quickly. With an incident like this, costs can very easily spiral even before the generation is affected. Potential damage to surrounding equipment is highly likely and short-notice outages are usually inevitable.
 

Our approach

As part of our Operational Control package, we provide our customers with alarm monitoring and safety management services. These services essentially provide peace of mind for our customers – they know that should a fault arise, it will be handled quickly and safely by the industry’s experts. Our alarm monitoring service is a popular and cost-effective solution, particularly for newly established companies who rely on National Grid’s Transmission Network Control Centre to monitor their alarms, rather than having to invest millions of pounds setting up their own control room.

Our ‘first line support service’ means that this emergency call was one of many incidents that we deal with 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, either remotely, or in this case, attending the site itself. As our expertly trained and authorised staff were on standby, they went directly to Marchwood and provided a diagnosis and solution within 2 hours of receipt of the emergency request.
 

Our people

Safety is always our top priority at National Grid and our systems, processes and training enable us to provide a thorough and safe service. Our engineers are highly experienced and skilled at working under pressure to quickly diagnose causes and rectify the fault. At Marchwood, our field engineers who are across England and Wales were immediately able to deploy a local delivery team of operational experts to diagnose the problem – a switch blocking on one of the site’s main generators.
 

Outcome

Scott Curtis, Marchwood Power Electrical Engineer, said:

Please pass on my praise and appreciation to everyone at National Grid who is involved with our support contract, especially the South-East team for their support during our outages and more importantly the assistance they provided with the fault on the Gen 3 circuit. Also, huge thanks to the substation engineers for the assistance they provided and the flexibility they offer during our shutdowns and safety management. Efficient teamwork, expert knowledge and quick turnaround – a great result.

Our '24-Hour Emergency Call-out' service is available as part of the Operational Control service, available to generators, DNOs, renewables  and interconnectors. If you would like to discuss this service with our team, please contact us.