Authorized Personnel Only - How to Start and Sync a 400,000 Watt Turbine Hydroelectric Generator

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[swimspud]

I work for a very large utility on the west coast in their hydro electric division. We're not allowed to show anyone the insides of the powerhouses and how they work (no public photography), so this is so cool that you are able to make these videos and show people how amazing Hydropower is!

[davidelliott]

During 1960s when U.K. was building big coal fired plants they had a few synchronising accidents.
One unit was grid connected 180 degrees out of phase (probably an instrument fault we don’t know) the rotor was spat out of the stator and thrown out of the building. Your 100 tons of rotating mass will always fail when hit by the grid. Thankfully nobody was hurt.

[principals]

I think this finally explains a story my grandfather told me many years ago about his time working in the power plant of a cement factory in the middle of the last century. He was bringing up a generator off a weir on the river and described a dial which I now understand to be a synchroscope. Grandpa messed up very badly while trying to get it in sync with PP&L and said the whole plant shook as for a few seconds the generator looked like it was trying to rip itself out of the ground. He saw some of the big bosses running down from the front office with what he was sure would be his pink slip. Grandpa managed to spin the generator back up and get it synchronized just before they arrived and then made a big show of playing dumb, walking around and inspecting all the gauges. With everything humming along perfectly, the bosses just shrugged and went back to the front office, leaving him to, and with, his job.

[Beateau]

I love the excitement at the end. Never lose that youthful passion.

[Whatsinanameanyway]

"Somewhere there's a bass fisherman half a mile up the river, wondering just what the hell is going on, as some idiot is learning how to bring a power plant online"

[adamzieba]

Back in the 80' when I was studying electrotechnics at the local Technical Univeristy in my home city of Łódź in Poland we students had practical exercises in the lab. One of them was to show us how to synchronize a generator with the grid. There was a 3-phase generator driven by a DC motor whose speed could easily be controlled. We had to bring the frequency of the generator as close to 50Hz as possible and then watch the lamps trying to fine tune the rotational speed and effectively the frequency to make the lamps blink really slowly, like once in every 2-3 seconds. After achieving this we had to wait for the moment these lamps got dark and instantly connect the generator to the grid.
There were circuit breakers so there was no danger of the generator falling apart in case of missynchronization.
That lab was a big fun for me.

[askomiko]

I kid you not: here in Finland, in 2016 a drunken guy broke into a hydroelectric power plant and started pressing all and any buttons he could find. The end result was one blown up 1.5 megawatt generator. I'd love to have seen that. He should have taken a time machine and watch this video I guess!

[julioczar]

Exactly what I needed to know! :) I was struggling to start my 400, 000 watt turbine hydroelectric generator after a reboot. I should mail it back for a refund.

[sb.sb.sb.]

as a PhD student in power systems, your videos keep me alive as i write my thesis

[lmiddleman]

Always amazed to realize, that as a plant like this connects and ramps up its power output, _all the other plants on the grid back off by the same amount_, keeping everything in balance.

[kls]

Typically when you initiate a "Start" on a hydro unit the governor will open the gate servo to a preset "Speed no load " position to roll the generator off close to synchronous speed . Excitation to the generator field can then be applied either manually or initiated automatically by a speed switch (now you will see generator AC voltage slowly building up on the volt meters) . Generator output frequency and voltage can now be matched to the bus frequency and voltage by slowly increasing the water flow applied to the turbine to adjust the frequency and the field current applied to increase or decrease generator output voltage being compared to the bus AC values . With a properly tuned governor you should be able to adjust the generator speed so the sync scope is slowly moving in a clockwise (gen freq faster than bus freq) and every time the pointer passes through 12 O'clock on the meter the generator is momentarily in sync with the bus and the generator breaker can be closed just before 12 O'clock (allowing for Generator breaker closing speed and slip frequency )synchronizing the generator to the grid . After synchronizing you can load the generator by increasing the governor speed setpoint and putting more water on the turbine . The generator speed cannot increase now as it is held at 60 hertz by the grid you will see watts increase out of the generator now with the water increase .
If you were to adjust the speed setpoint down now to the point where you are not producing generator watts output you are then "Motoring " the generator but generator frequency will remain at 60 Hz. held by the grid . Increasing or decreasing the generator field current will result in Vars out, unity power factor . or Vars in condition but that is a lesson for another day. Hope this helps people who expressed interest.

[ChiliBass]

Thanks so much for making this video! I'm an electrical engineer and I've always been fascinated with the power grid and I really appreciate the opportunity to look behind the scenes. I almost went the "Power" route out of school but chose control systems and signal processing. No regrets, but I still get a thrill seeing big systems do their thing. Thanks again!

[timothystockman]

Way back when I was a student at Purdue University in the 1970s, there was a machine lab in the EE building with WWII surplus motor generator sets. The instructor gave a demo with a set consisting of a variable speed electric motor and a 3-phase generator. He had three light bulbs and a knife switch. He tweaked on the motor speed until the lights were flashing very slowly, but he mis-timed closing the switch. This was about a 10 HP set mounted on big shock mounts, and I thought sure it was going to rip itself off those mounts as the rotor tried to turn about 60 degrees instataeously when he closed the switch. So I got a very convincing demonstration of what you avoided, albeit on a much smaller scale.

[beefgoat]

I always enjoy watching people love what they do. My wife catalogs art for an auction house, and she loves it. I am a watchmaker, and I love it. We were both 40 when we started on these respective paths. Don't give up on a dream kids! It's never too late to start something new.

[commenter]

What you want when you close the breaker is for the synchroscope to be going slowly in the fast direction (spinning clockwise). Then close the breaker at about 10 degrees from the top. This way it closes right at the top.

You want it slow in the fast direction because then when the breaker is closed, the machine will take on some load immediately. If it's moving in the slow direction (like it was in the video), the machine becomes a load on the grid at first (until he started loading it by opening the valves a bit more).

[nameismetatoo]

This video was enlightening! I never really thought about the force that the grid exerts on the generator, but I see just how crucial it is for the generator to be in sync. Connecting to the grid is like matching engine RPM when doing a clutch-less shift in a manual transmission. The generator is like the engine, with its RPM governed by a valve that controls the flow of some fluid. The grid has inertia, just like a moving car (albeit many many orders of magnitude more). When you shift in a car and the RPM of the input shaft doesn't match that of the output, then your engine is going to spin up or down as some of the kinetic energy of the car is transferred to it. The way you have to fine-tune the flow also reminded me of the process of tuning old pot-controlled analog televisions (back when analog signals were still broadcast) as you watched the image tear and scroll up or down the screen, trying to get the scan rates to sync up.

[andyfeimsternfei]

I've been doing hydro for 42 years and my biggest advise is to buy a multifunction generator protection relay. My favorite these days is the SEL 700G relay. The $3-4k cost is the best money you will ever spend on your hydro plant. It will protect your generator from any fault and give you the capability of full autosync . Good luck, small hydro isn't easy!

[barahng]

I love how you talk to the machine like you're a Techpriest from 40k. The Machine Spirit must be appeased!

[erikk]

This takes me back to my Navy days onboard an Oliver Hazard Perry (FFG-7) frigate. As an Electric Plant Control Console operator, I got really good at synchronizing to "shore power" and picking up or removing the grid power. Four Stewart Stevenson V16 diesel engines capable of generaterating about 750 kW each.

[carldaniel]

Cool video, which brings back two memories for me. First, as an electrical engineering student, I remember doing this in the power lab at school. Of course, the powerplant we were syncing was much smaller - maybe 100KW, powered by a large DC motor instead of water. Same principals though. Second was even earlier - in high school I worked as a draftsman at a local hydroelectric dam. Since I was interested in electrical engineering, the chief engineer at the dam took me under his wing. We went all over that dam, the powerplant, inside the control cabinets. One day we were out touring around when they took one of the 60MW generators offline, which we watched from down in the shaft gallery where the wicket gate control servo was located. Normally, these huge hydraulics move imperceptibly slow, but on shutdown (and I can only imagine, startup), I saw how quickly this huge mechanism could move. It was awesome.