The extension project was awarded by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Energy in August 2007 to the Siemens Power Generation Consortium. In 2005, Siemens PG had built Az Zour as a gas turbine power plant with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts. The power plant, which is located 80km south of Kuwait City, can be fired with either natural gas or oil.
On July 4 Siemens PG and the Kuwaiti Ministry of Energy also signed a long-term maintenance agreement for the gas turbine part of the plant. This is the first time that the Kuwaiti government has awarded a service contract for a power plant of this size. Siemens will perform the maintenance for the eight gas turbines for the upcoming five years and will also supply replacement parts for the turbines and generators.
Konecranes supplied 27 cranes for the first phase of the Az Zour power plant and it is now contracted to supply two 170t cranes for the new extension. The contract includes the supply of a 320t lifting beam to enable tandem lifting.
The cranes will be with air conditioned control cabins and will have DynAHoist inverters on each hoist motion and DynAC inverters on the travel and traverse motions. Both main and auxiliary hoists will have True Vertical Lifting. The cranes will have Konecranes state of the art hi tech components fitted, including load and condition monitoring, festoon cables, floodlights, tandem operation of both cranes from one crane cabin with feed back monotiorsing of the ‘slave’ crane to the ‘master’ crane, back-up rado control, tropicalised electrics, disc brakes, limit switches on all motions and heaters in panels, motors, long travel conductors, isolators and anti-collision.
