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 GE loans $40m towards Wayang Windu expansion


Thursday, 5 November

While Australia is pursuing HFR and HSA geothermal resources, both of which require slightly different approaches compared to conventional geothermal technology, one of the biggest conventional geothermal resource potentials in the world is in Indonesia. Indonesian geothermal resource potential is estimated at 27510 megawatts. But the current installed capacaity is only slightly over 1000 MWe or about 5% of this capacity. The aim of the Indonesian government is to increase the installed capacity to 9500 MWe of geothermal capacity by 2025. Towards this aim, the Indonesian company Star Energy received a $50m-loan from GE Financial Services yesterday to expand the Wayang Windu plant, currently producing 220 MWe. The plant recently has been expanded by a second turbine-generator unit, the design and construction of which supervised by Maunsell AECOM. The original plant had the fame of owning the biggest single geothermal turbine in the world currently delivering 110 MW of electricity into the Indonesian national grid. So unless someone bought a larger turbine in the last three years, the Wayang Windu now must have the fame of owning the world's two largest geothermal turbines. In fact, when opening the second turbine unit earlier this year, the Star Energy CEO announced that they would double the plant capacity again in the next 3 years by adding two more units of the same capacity, bringing the total Wayang Windu capacity to over 400MWe. This would make it indeed one of the world's largest geohermal plants to all indices of measurement. The $50m loan agreement signed off a few days ago between GE and Start Energy must be one of the steps leading in that direction.

The Wayang Windu plant taps into naturally occurring underground pockets of steam and hot water, with wells as deep as 3 kms. The geothermal fluid is brought to the surface, it is flashed before running through the turbine. The turbine exhaust steam is condensed and reinjected. The cooling system is a closed circuit consisting of a direct contact condenser and a wet cooling tower. The sketch shows the lay-out of the first 110-MW unit from an article published in the Fuji Technology Review in 2001. I copy the major specifications of the turbine from the same source:
  • Type: single cylinder, double flow and condensing type
  • Output : 110 MW
  • Inlet steam conditions : 1.02 MPa and 181 oC
  • Exhaust pressure : 0.012 MPa
  • Number of stages : 2(flows) x 8
  • Length of LSB (Last Stage Blades) : 697 mm
  • Bearing span : 5800 mm
  • Speed : 3000 RPM
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