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Feature

A visit to Ghorashal

Mabroor Wassey

“Amidst all the power crisis, rest assured, you'll have 24 hours electricity”. That is what our head of the EEE department, Prof. Kazi Khairul Islam told us at the end of the briefing session for all the trainees.

Every year, after the third year finals, students from all three departments of IUT go for an intensive one-month 'Industrial Training'. This year, we have been to several BTTB exchanges, Energypac, Atomic Energy Commission, CERS(PDB) and the Ghorasal Power Station, spending a week in each. Each visit was unique in itself as young engineers (a year to graduate) got up-close with all the equipments and techniques used in the real world. But none was better than our visit to the Ghorasal Thermal Power Station (GTPS).

Housing most of its 1250 employees within its boundaries, GTPS has an installed capacity of 950MW from its six generating units. We were told the very first day that many engineers have worked in power stations for years and have not had the opportunity to see a dissected plant. But we were lucky as one of the two 55MW units, installed in 1974 and 1976 respectively were undergoing overhauling by a team of sixty Russian experts. Amongst the other four units of 210MW capacity each, unit 3 was undergoing maintenance, as its condenser tubes were out of order.

The class continued till 5pm that day with detailed discussion on the Plant auxiliaries and a visit to all the auxiliaries. As soon as class ended, we were out for a boat ride on the Shitalakkha. Boating upstream at dusk, we kept the ride alive by singing at the top of our voices. We looked at the power station and the fertilizer factory beside it from a different angle now and it looked beautiful. The fire on top of the fertilizer factory looked very pleasing against the dark sky. We returned exhausted, had the brilliant food cooked by the mess-cook, but the night had only started as we had to write a report on the day's class. But, University students after all, adda has to be there. Suddenly we heard booming noises. Three bursts. It sounded like a jet plane directly over our head. We came back to earth a while later, and continued as if nothing happened. But the next day, the very first question we asked the teacher was “What was that noise?” As it turned out, it was nothing but one of the gigantic boilers releasing some of the excess steam.

Our discussion that day revealed a statistic that startled us. 3 crore taka worth of natural gas is used everyday to generate electricity in Bangladesh. After a 3 hour class we made our way to the 30 meter high machine house containing the six units - the boilers at the back and the transformers in front - for the first time. The word 'huge' was redefined for us. It took us an hour just to walk through all the stages of one of the units. The boiler and the switchyard (largest in South Asia) were saved for another day. We had the opportunity to peek at a burning furnace. The glowing fire reminded one of our teammates of hell, and he didn't miss a prayer till the end of the trip.

As if the power crisis wasn't bad enough already, we heard that same booming sound during Fajr the next night but this time for a continuous 5 minutes. Proving our assumptions true, our instructor told us (coolly) that unit-6 was down. I did not understand the implication of this 210MW unit going down till a friend of mine called from Dhaka the next day asking about the unit-6 failure he has read in the papers. Dhaka's in blackout, he said, and I realized how pleasant our trip was without any load sheddings, and what our families were going through back home. But to my friend's disappointment, I had no satisfactory answer as to when the unit would be up. The simple reason being, a plant this huge takes three days to fully stop, before investigations can be made. The temperature of the turbine comes down from an astounding 600*C to 100*C.

Back in IUT after the final viva and report submission, we are definitely missing GTPS and the outstanding teachers and of course the uninterrupted power supply. According to newspaper reports, both unit-3 and 6 are back running. One thing is for sure though, none of us back from GTPS blame engineers for the crisis anymore.

(EEE, IUT)