Port Washington Generating Station

Powering Up

We Energies generates a winner

By Jennifer Pfaff

It takes a mind-boggling amount of preparation to make a job site run smoothly when 600 people work there on any given day.

But, then, that’s what it takes to meet the state’s future power needs — at least a portion of them.

We Energies undertook just such a project when it began converting the Port Washington Generating Station from coal fuel to natural gas in 2003. The $330 million project called for replacing the five coal-burning units already in use with two natural gas units.

“To me, what I found most interesting is the site access constraints and the volume of workers we had on the site — the sheer size of the building,” said Doug Wetjen, who managed the project for We Power with Project Director Mark Stone.

The Port Washington Generating Station is an intermediate-load plant, generating electricity needs beyond those satisfied by base-load plants. It does not run constantly but kicks in when customers are using more power than usual, such as during air-conditioning season.

The project was the first in We Energies Power the Future plan, which addresses future electricity needs and what it will take to generate that needed power. And for this portion of the plan, timing was tight.

It got even tighter as regulatory delays pushed construction back a few months. But, Wetjen said, the completion date could not be adjusted because forecasts predicted that additional capacity would be needed by 2005.

“The summer demands from We Energies’ customers are higher than spring and fall,” he said. “We worked to a more compressed schedule. We worked two shifts for a long period of time. We worked a lot of overtime.”


	Project Name: Port Washington Generating Station Location: Port Washington Submitting Company: We Energies, Milwaukee General Contractor: Wisconsin Power Constructors LLC, Port Washington Architects: Washington Group International, Boise, Idaho, and Kahler Slater Architects Inc., Milwaukee Engineer: Washington Group International Owner: PWGS LLC, an affiliate of We Energies Project Cost: $330 million Project Size: About 360,000 square feet Start Date: June 2003 Completion Date: July 2005

The extra effort paid off, and the construction team got the first unit online and serving customers on July 16.

But before the project team could get the unit constructed, it had to demolish two of the coal units.

“There were two significant challenges,” Wetjen said. “The first was just schedule, time frame.

“The second challenge was building on an existing site. We still had functioning coal units on the site. We still had the west wall of the coal plant.”

That wall stayed up, despite the inconvenience it caused for construction, to serve as a noise and dust barrier protecting homes across the street. It also provided a familiar architectural landmark for the community.

“It was a façade the community had grown up with,” Wetjen said.

But accessing the site, just one block away from downtown Port Washington, was hard without disrupting neighbors. We Energies was lucky that despite the power plant’s 10-acre footprint, the company actually owns 90 acres there, most of which is on top of a bluff.

A portion of the available land was made into a parking lot for the hundreds of workers on the site every day. Other portions were turned into an access road that allowed materials to travel through a nearby industrial park to the construction site.

The project team took equipment shipments from boat, rail and truck to build the 200-by-300-by-120-foot building that houses the combined-cycle power plant and to install the turbines and other machinery needed to convert natural gas into electricity.

The combined-cycle plant uses natural gas to power a turbine and create steam, and the steam then powers another turbine to create electricity.

Once the team builds the second unit, which should be complete by 2008, the plant will generate up to 11,000 megawatts of electricity, nearly triple the capacity of the old coal plant, Wetjen said.