Thames Gateway
Customer: Acciona Agua / Interserve
Site Owner: Thames Water
Value: £13.5m
The Thames Water Gateway Desalination Plant on the Beckton STW Site in East London, a joint venture between Interserve and Acciona Agua, is the first of its kind in the UK. Designed to abstract saline water from the river Thames and then via a process consisting of Intake Clarification, Pre-treatment, 4 Stage Reverse Osmosis and Re-hardening Post Treatment, deliver Desalinated water to the North East London Reservoirs and finally into the Thames Water Ring Main. Supplying up to 140 million litres of water a day to London during times of drought, it is powered in the main using energy from renewable sources.
FSD, together with JV partners Anord Control Systems, were awarded the contract to design, supply, install and commission the 415/690V MCC’s and associated cabling and Busducting, along with the 33kV and 11kV cabling associated with the HV/MV Distribution Systems.
During the detailed design phase a value engineering exercise was completed in conjunction with the Main Contractor and Thames Water, the output from this exercise resulted in savings of 12.5% on the Initial Target Cost of the project. The key areas that delivered the saving were:
- Change to water cooled drives for large VSD’s – reduction in panel size (30% saving) with resultant
- saving in building footprint etc and air conditioning costs
- Use of packaged sub-stations where practical
- Use of Busbar in place of cables from transformers to MCC
- Use remote I/O for instrumentation / valves
- Change of protection device type – MCCB’s to fuses
- Use of Intelligent MCC’s as opposed to conventional
- Change of sub-distribution cabling from 33KV to 11KV
- Use of Profibus cabling for instruments
During the detailed design phase Anord and FSD worked closely with our client’s engineers. There was a significant level of change during the design phase, which required collaborative working between all parties to ensure that the resultant project solution was tailored to meet all the client’s demands.
During the project Thames Water decided to enhance the overall sites power supply infrastructure . AnordFSD received a variation to divert 3 off 33KV supplies via a new 4 section 33KV switchboard. A critical aspect of the project was ensuring continuity of the power supplies to a vitally important treatment plant. In addition to the cabling and the hardware the variation also encompassed the supply, installation and commissioning all associated control and instrumentation hardware and cabling which had to be interfaced to the site wide Mimic and Power Management System.