Greenville Utilities Battles the Summer Heat

Dan Smith is a Generator Specialist in the Electric Department at Greenville Utilities Corp. GUC operates diesel-engine peak-shaving generators at 12 industrial and large customer sites to reduce electrical demand during coincident peak periods. Last fiscal year, the generators helped avoid more than $1.5 million in electrical demand costs.

Dan doesn’t stop at best maintenance practices. Always concerned about implementing the best financial options possible, Dan was part of a team effort to get GUC’s generators running at their maximum continuous rated load during hot weather. On very hot days the generators were tripping alarms and shutting down when they were running at higher temperatures than recommended. The short-term fix was to open doors on the generators’ enclosures and to lower the operating level by 100 kW below their designed capacity -- not an ideal solution as the reduced output would cost GUC thousands of dollars a year.

Dan, along with GUC staff and Gregory Poole Power Systems’ Product Support Account Manager, Brian Medlin, came up with a unique solution. The answer was to design and install secondary external radiators that would keep the engines’ temperatures within operating standards, allowing them to run at capacity.

Once it was decided to go with the external radiator solution, Dan worked with Gregory Poole to make it happen. At the time, nobody had solved the problem in this way. Now, other companies and power suppliers travel to Greenville to see how it works so they can enhance their own systems.

From left are GUC Generator Specialist Dan Smith, Facility Maintenance Coordinator with Keihin Carolina Systems Technology Roy Baker, Product Support Account Manager for Gregory Poole Brian Medlin, Commercial Business Product Support Manager for Gregory Poole Joanne Beal, and Product Support Manager for Caterpillar Gary Ryba