"Don't let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds.
How many astrologers after pompous forecasts about other's ends.
How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality
How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves.
How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they themselves were immortal.
How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others.
And all the ones you know yourself, one after another.
One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time.
Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.
To pass through this brief life as nature demands.
To give it up without complaint.
Like an olive that ripens and falls.
Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on." - Marcus Aurelius
The previous Career Autobiography post is here.
Below: An aerial view of the Elk Hills Power Plant during a maintenance outage.
In the late 1990s through the early 2000s, there was a massive boom in US power plant construction - and the construction was mostly focused toward power plants that used gas turbine/combined cycle (GTCC) technology. The demand for the GTCC design was driven by the efficiency gains enabled by combining recent advances in high-efficiency gas turbines with waste heat boilers. The heat recovered by the waste heat boiler captured a great deal of the heat in the gas turbine exhaust, and was used to drive a second turbine, this one driven by steam.
Below: GTCC simplified diagram, courtesy of Shigehiro Shiozaki, ... Akira Yamada, in Advances in Power Boilers, 2021
As a result of that power plant construction boom, it was not too difficult to find a job at a power plant that was then under construction. It helped a great deal if you had experience,and a halfway decent reputation in the business. Reputation (at least among wagies) is important in this industry, because the industry is so insular. Everyone knows a few people who have worked with you, unless the job is across the country.
My commute to the difficult working environment at La Paloma Generating plant took me past a railroad siding. At the siding was a medium sized General Electric steam turbine, which sat on a rail car for several months. That steam turbine and I were destined to spend nearly a decade together.
Below: A General Electric D-11 High Pressure and Reheat turbine, like the one I observed on the rail car.
I had a decent enough reputation at La Paloma (and the boss had a bad enough one), that even though my time there - and by extension, my gas turbine experience - was brief, I was picked up for commissioning and start-up at another new facility - Elk Hills Power.
At this power plant, they managed to avoid a number of personnel pitfalls that La Paloma got tangled up in. The handful of errors they made hiring personnel, they corrected. One thing that I've learned over the years, is that lack of knowledge can be remedied with training, but there's only one remedy for bad character. There was an awesome group assembled at Elk Hills, and it was a much better experience to be part of that initial team.
Elk Hills was configured in a standard 2x1 arrangement: Two gas turbines and boilers, sending the combined steam output to a single steam turbine - the same turbine I'd been driving past for a year or so, and wondering whether it would lead to be my salvation from misery. The power plant components were the much more common GE 7FA gas turbines, with a GE D-11 steam turbine. The output of this plant was 550 Megawatts, about half of La Paloma.
I was assigned to be the "system expert" on the generators, exciters, static starting system, and the auxiliary systems: hydrogen analyzers, and the seal oil system, and the steam turbine hydraulic system. The "system expert" is required to learn a deep knowledge of their assigned system, and then develop operating procedures, training material, and recommend a list of spare parts.
Below: A one-line diagram of the static starting device for the gas turbine. One of my systems.
I was pretty pleased with these system assignments. I never had a chance to purge the hydrogen-cooled generator at ACE, and none of the other generators that I'd operated were hydrogen cooled. At ACE, the system expert always did the generator purges, while I was stuck dealing with my own systems - and I always felt that I'd been deprived of an opportunity to learn something new and interesting. Now it would be my turn to take a generator filled with explosive hydrogen gas and render it safe for maintenance during outages, and to refill it again with hydrogen afterwards
I took the 'system expert' thing to a new level at this job. I tried to have a really solid understanding of every system - including those that were not assigned to me. For one thing, I believe in being well-rounded, and this means knowing how to do anything and everything. You never know it all, but you should strive for that.
Gaining knowledge was far more important at Elk Hills than at La Paloma, because Elk Hills was a more traditional power plant: It was less less automated, and required a great deal more operating skill and knowledge than La Paloma. Since "Auto" wouldn't be operating most of the equipment at Elk Hills Power, it was important to have the knowledge foundation to operate all that "non system expert" equipment safely and properly as well.
As a result, I ended up writing all of the start-up and shutdown procedures for the power plant, as well as taking a single gas turbine offline while leaving a single gas turbine running with the steam turbine on line. Then I wrote the procedure for starting up that single gas turbine and blending the steam in with the running unit. Writing all the procedures and ensuring that they were correct so that others could rely on them was extremely mentally taxing, because I'd never operated a power plant of this design before. The enjoyment of learning and sharing what I'd learned made all the effort worth it.
At every new construction project there is always a lot of political jockeying - stuff that I've always tried to steer clear of. They've gathered people from all over the place, with a variety of differing experience and knowledge. Nobody knows who will wind up with the boss' favor, and there are always more people talented at sucking up than at working hard. As a co-worker once put it, "Everyone wants to ride in the wagon, and nobody wants to be part of the team of horses."
So - particularly at a new project - none of the hierarchy is yet established, and people are trying to get a good position in the pecking order. This is typically done either by undercutting others, kissing ass, or by blowing one's own contributions out of proportion. You can also do your job well and not complain, but that's a much more difficult path ;)
I just worked hard, tried to learn everything I could, and do a good job at everything that was asked of me. At the completion of construction and commissioning, I was assigned as one of the four shift lead operators. This was based partly on my job performance, and partly on experience I brought to the job. The experience came from the odd variety of power plants that I'd previously operated. The other three leads were solid operators as well, although they lacked nuclear and geothermal experience.
Within a few more years, the Plant Manager asked me to put in for the Operations and Maintenance Manager position when it came open. I turned his request down firmly. I know where my strengths are, and know that I would not enjoy managing people. Why trade a job that I really love for one that I'm not good at and don't enjoy? I get paid to operate something interesting - like playing with a really big train set with dozens of trains on it. Below are a few pictures that I took right about the time I started this blog.
Below: Atop one of the boilers. A couple of steam lines in the background have not yet been insulated. Pretty sure this was close to initial firing on one of the turbines.
Below: Turbine section is in the process of having the first stage "buckets" removed. ("Buckets" are the official terminology for what I like to call rotating blades). The yellow color is a protective ceramic coating to protect each blade from hot and corrosive combustion gas.
Below: One of the buckets from underneath, showing the cooling air passages. Air is forced into the rotor from the compressor discharge, and is routed into each bucket to cool it. A series of tiny holes allow the air to escape each bucket, forming a thin film of air that also protects these blades from the corrosive combustion gas.
Below: Yours truly in front of a GE 7FA gas turbine rotor. The compressor section is on the right, and the turbine section is on the left.
Below: Low pressure section of the steam turbine.
Below: Left to right - the HP, Reheat, and LP sections of the steam turbine. The machine I'd been watching on the railroad siding all those years before.
Below: Steam turbine diaphragms (stationary blading) after sandblasting.
Below: A picture of yours truly inside the gas turbine exhaust plenum. You can see light behind because the top casing of the turbine has been removed for outage work.
Over time, personnel come and go, and it was the same at this place. Management changed, and usually not for the better. Even so, there were a lot of wonderful colleagues over the years that I worked with there, many of whom I still stay in contact with. I can't say that about most of the other places I've worked - with the exception of the submarine.
At the end of my time there, for several months, things were not going well with the equipment. Management was under a lot of pressure from the owners, and in turn they were putting a lot of pressure on me and a couple of other key hourly people. It was really a rough time, and everyone was miserable. One week during this period of my own very low morale, I got a cold call from a head-hunter, who asked if I would be interested in a job. The phone call turned out to be a life-changing one.
The next career autobiography post is here.
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