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A Breath of Fresh Air
Meriden's CNF Constructors takes energy production to new heights
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Business New Haven
7/3/1995
By: Lori Green
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While bringing coals to Newcastle is the classic exercise in redundancy, what if Newcastle is in fact willing to pay a handsome sum to have them - especially if these are cheaper coals that produce more usable power? In bringing high-tech windmills to Holland and other countries around the globe, CNF Constructors Inc. is a company that is jolting the alternative energy industry.
As manufacturers of energy power plants, CNF has projects in progress in El Paso, Tex., throughout the Caribbean and a stone's throw from the rock of Gibraltar. Along with its parent company, the San Francisco-based Kenetech Corp., CNF's business is providing large-scale wind plants and fossil fuel cogeneration plants to meet the energy needs of commercial and individual consumers.
The firm was originally founded in Meriden by Charles Noel Flagg as the Taylor & Flagg Plumbing Co. in 1910. By 1917, under its new name, C.N. Flagg & Co., the company was gaining a respectable local reputation for the installation of heating, ventilation, plumbing and fire-protection systems. During the 1950s and '60s, under the leadership of Flagg's son, Peter, CNF grew into one of the leading specialty electrical and mechanical contractors in the Northeast. Today CNF is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kenetech Corp. and a sister company of Kenetech Windpower, the world's largest wind energy company.
CNF's expertise is in designing the mechanical and electrical specifications for wind energy and cogeneration facilities. This includes combustion turbines, heat-recovery steam generators, steam turbines and instrumentation and control systems. The company also assembles, operates and helps to maintain all installations once they are operational.
Although there are no wind plants in Connecticut, the firm was the turnkey constructor of the Hartford Steam Co.'s cogeneration facility in Hartford, which provides steam to Hartford Hospital for all of its cooling needs, as well as generating electrical output to the Connecticut Light & Power grid. The plant sits on a 7,500-square-foot footprint and took a year to build - breakneck speed compared with the construction and testing of a typical nuclear power plant.
On projects such as these located in-state, CNF makes an effort to use local companies as suppliers; however, for out-of-state or overseas jobs, contracts typically go to the lowest bidders.
Along the dry mountainous terrain of southern California and perched on a green plateau in Minnesota are clusters of rugged but elegant wind towers serenely transforming the local winds into countless hours of electrical service to homes, hospitals, factories and offices.
These CNF-designed and -assembled turbine towers vary in height and number. Many turbine towers are as high as 120 feet, with the bigger installations consisting of 73 separate wind turbines that produce 25 megawatts of power - enough to meet the power needs of 18,000 homes.
Part of the charm of these wind turbines is their placement in isolated, middle-of-nowhere locations. That is, there doesn't seem to be any control booth or maintenance office on the site itself. So who's keeping an eye on these things? “All of our 6,000 wind turbines worldwide are monitored and controlled from a control room in our Livermore facility,” explains CNF vice president Dan Haas. “They are highly automated and very safe. CNF trains and sub-contracts with local maintenance vendors who can respond if Livermore calls to say a problem has been detected.” The modular design of the wind plant enables repairs to be made without interrupting operation or service delivery.
When Kenetech itself becomes involved in a project, as it is in all CNF's wind plant constructions, CNF first enters the process at the point when the power purchase agreement is signed. The utility company or private investor seeking to build a cogeneration facility or wind power plant will generally sign a development and operating contract with CNF/Kenetech for periods of from five to 30 years. “We can make these commitments,” says Haas, “because we expect to bring the cost of energy down to less than four cents per kilowatt hour.” The 1992 National Energy Policy Act and Energy Production Tax Credit help to make this low-cost projection achievable.
Typically several partners are involved in the ownership of an energy plant. In another of CNF's projects, the Onondaga Cogeneration Facility in Syracuse, N.Y., the plant generates 79 megawatts of electrical energy for the Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. and provides export steam to the Crucible Steel and the Salt City steam systems. The plant took 18 months to complete.
Even though these cogeneration plants may not have the same enigmatic quality about them as the wind turbines, they do represent the increasing feasibility of using technological innovations to decentralize power production and to deliver energy more efficiently at lower cost to consumers. With deregulation of the energy industry just around the corner, cogeneration plants that supply various types of energy to end-users are expected to multiply.
This development is also likely to expand large-scale usage of the most highly renewable source of energy available: wind. “Deregulation of the power industry is going to mean that there will be greater competition to acquire large, suitable tracts of land for power facilities,” explains Haas. CNF and Kenetech continue to actively prospect for good wind locations. “In the case of wind plants, we first send out a meteorological “wind team” to assess wind conditions. Prospective sites are usually monitored closely for at least a year before plans are drawn up.” The rise of the ground (preferably a ridge or high point) determines the best foundation for the wind turbines, since air moves faster on hilltops.
Before setting out, the wind team studies average wind speed maps based on historical data to identify potential sites. Once a specific site is selected to investigate, they begin scouting the area, looking for evidence of conducive wind activity. One of the key signs is the presence of “flagging” plants on a site - plants that grow or have leaves which grow sideways. Measuring the degree of the “flagging” allows for a more precise estimate of the prevailing wind speeds.
Having established that a location is appropriate for a wind plant, considerable time is then spent trying to acquire land or obtain the necessary permits. But the actual design, manufacturing, assembly and construction of an average-size wind plant takes only between six and nine months to complete.
One of CNF's current non-wind projects is building a liquefied natural gas plant in Puerto Rico. The process involves liquefied gas being shipped from the Middle East to Puerto Rico as frozen gas, at a temperature of -500° Fahrenheit, which is then converted at the plant into liquefied fuel. CNF concentrates its marketing efforts towards fossil fuel projects such as this one and a gas-fired plant it recently designed and built in Jamaica, while Kenetech focuses on the marketing for wind plant business.
Back in the old country, where hundreds of windmills made of stone, brick and wood still stand, CNF is in the process of constructing a variable speed wind turbine plant near the northern city of Groningen, the Netherlands. The project, 90-percent owned by a major Dutch utility company, will use 94 interconnected speed wind turbine towers to generate pollution-free electricity at a price competitive with newly constructed fossil fuel plants.
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