From turning on the light in a room and running a coffee maker to maintaining the antennas and correlator operations at OSF and AOS…. for everything to work as usual there has to be a team behind it working day and night: that’s the Power Group.
“All this never appears in the daily and monthly ALMA report because its operation is super stable, but we are doing things every day so that it is maintained. It’s not magic,” says Rolando Olivos, our Infrastructure Maintenance Group (IMG) Manager.
The electrical system – within the IMG area – has an important and difficult task, because in addition to distributing the energy that supplies all of AOS and OSF, it must generate it by burning butane gas in an isolated area of the Atacama Desert.
The team
Each shift has 11 technicians and three specialists, accompanied by a supervisor and IMG’s manager, all dedicated day to day monitoring, inspection and maintenance of the power supply. “We are multidisciplinary because here we have mechanical, electrical and electronic operators. We complement each other,” says José Garroz, our Mechanical Technician, and electrical operator.
“We check the entire plant every day and you always find some abnormality. This is reported on a shift-by-shift basis and that’s how we make progress. Today the equipment is already oiled,” adds José.
While only one of the three turbines is needed to supply the entire site, any failure leaves the entire observatory without power, as there is no automatic failover system and enabling another turbine takes time.
“The failures in our area are notorious, everyone knows it. And as long as nothing happens, it’s like a silent job, but high risk. So you have to be very meticulous, follow all the procedures. Make sure, once, twice, three times, because if you touch something that is energized, you will probably come out of it very badly or not alive,” says Cristian Egaña, our IMG area supervisor, who stresses that the team’s rigorousness in mitigating risks is key.
A silent record
When the turbines arrived in 2012, the group used to have unscheduled shutdowns every three months. Learning along the way, in April this year we achieved the record of more than 22 months of continuous operation without interruptions.
Records like this speak of the good performance of the Power Group and, according to Eric Bustos, our IMG Electrical Specialist, we can compare ourselves to an international level.
This is because there are indicators such as the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) that show the energy interruption that reaches users. The closer the number is to 0, the lower the interruption and the better the experience for the consumer. Globally, Chile has a SAIDI of 10, but ALMA registers indicators close to zero, comparable to the best performances in Europe, such as Germany and the Netherlands.
(Source: Master in Technologies and Management of Non-Conventional Renewable Energies, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. Last updated data).
“At ALMA we have from generation to distribution, which is like a country within a small generation system, with all the problems that entails, and even so we have achieved almost two years with zero outage hours”, Eric concludes.
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Tremendo labor y gran equipo!! Felicitaciones, Sin duda fruto del esfuerzo, pasión y trabajo colaborativo!!