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As Pontes
And suddenly there was silence
The reinforced concrete chimney at the As Pontes Thermal Power Plant, 356 metres high.
It was a Saturday in July 1986. I was in the middle of an official exam to become a teacher in Vigo when they called me from Endesa, which was then called the National Electricity Company. They were looking for the highest placed in the Engineering promotion to offer us an internship contract.
I left the valve design I was struggling with and went out of the classroom to talk on the phone under the constant watch of an official. They told me that I had to make a decision right then to start the following Monday in As Pontes. As Pontes? I didn't even know what it was. And all I knew about thermal power plants were seven sheets of notes. But I decided to embark on the adventure.
The trip from Orense where I lived took me all Sunday. A bus to Lugo, another to Villalba, and, finally, after one final change, As Pontes. I was already beginning to make it out on the horizon because of the extraordinary chimney, with smoke always pouring out of it. That is how I arrived, 23 years' old and full of enthusiasm, in the then isolated and rather ugly industrial town of As Pontes, with its spectacular mining-electricity complex.
The SAE (auxiliary services) Panel, which feeds internal electrical distribution at the Power Station.
The geographical location was not so bad, it was just 30 kilometres from the coast, but communications were quite complicated. It took about two hours to travel 60 kilometres from As Pontes to A Coruña or Lugo.
The population of town increased very suddenly and went from having very few inhabitants to 15,000; young people from many parts of the country, practically all of them working for Endesa and the contracting companies, which were involved in mining and the thermal power plant.
The control room
So, on Monday I showed up at the power station and was taken straight to the control room, where I would work as a trainee dashboard operator. I was lost for words when I saw that 18-metre-long dashboard, full of green, orange and red lights, buttons, ammeters, indicator panels, recorders, measuring equipment, and all controlled by a single person. It was not so sure that I one day would ever master it.
But I learned quickly. In four months of intense training and help from my colleagues I was already able to operate it. I found I was in a very good working environment, a very close relationship. There were no differences between bosses and operators. The former tried to help the latter to get things done and overcome the difficulties. And there were plenty of these because this foreign engineering technology was of a very high level. And it still is.
The fact is, when it came to servicing and maintaining the machines, As Pontes looked like the UN. About a thousand foreign and Spanish support workers arrived and stayed for a couple of months.
That was because the powdered coal combustion boilers are American, made by Foster Wheeler; the fuel preparation systems are German, made by EVT; the steam turbines, turbo pumps and condenser pumps are Japanese, Mitsubishi; the alternators are American, made by Westinghouse; the circulation pumps are also American, made by General Electric; the fans and machines in the coal deposit are German, KKK and Krupp, etc. The technology was often manufactured here, but the engineering was and is mostly imported.
The covered Coal Deposit, the size of ten football pitches.
This makes it difficult to operate and maintain this type of installation. It takes a lot of knowledge to run the largest coal-fired power plant in Spain. And when I arrived at As Pontes, it had already been operating for eight years (Endesa began building it in 1974 and it was completed in 1978).
35 times more powerful
At that time, the most experienced workers were brought in from the Calvo Sotelo National Company, the first coal-fired thermal company founded in Spain after the Civil War, in the 1940s. So they went from a 40 megawatt plant to a 1,400 megawatt plant (four 350 megawatt generators). It covered no less than 6% of the country's electricity demand.
Behind the power station there was also a 400 kilovolt high-voltage installation, also belonging to Endesa, to which all the generation plants in Galicia were connected. That is, from where 25% of the energy consumed in Spain came (and continues to come). Any mistake in the operation from the control room would leave a quarter of the population in Spain without electricity. This is what happened in 1988, when a trip from a power line probably caused by a storm produced an energy zero situation. The Copa del Rey football matches had to be suspended due to the blackout, which lasted an hour and a half.
I remember how everything there became like in a dream. The power station went completely dark and only the emergency lights on the dashboard lit up. All the alarms went off and the noise was deafening. Nobody knew where to go or what to do. Moments like that stay with you forever. A bad day for the shift manager who was operating the power station. He was just a year older than me.
“I remember how everything there became like in a dream. The power station went completely dark and only the emergency lights on the dashboard lit up. All the alarms went off and the noise was deafening”.
The turbine regulation valve box.
I found myself in a stunning mining/electricity complex; in first-class industrial installations. That attracted me and I felt that there was a future, although many people told me otherwise, because there was already very little coal left in the open-pit mine. It was expected to close in about 10 or at most 15 years. And this is how far we have come.
By mobile
Today there are only about 40 people working here. The combined machines and conveyor belts in the coal deposit, which previously had shifts of twenty workers, have all been automated and digitalised and now operate alone. The control room which used to handle 1,800 signals now handles 12,000. We have reached a point where we can use a mobile phone to verify the conditions in power station. And soon we will even be able to start it up by phone.
“We have reached a point where we can use a mobile phone to verify the conditions in power station. And soon we will even be able to start it up by phone”.
Although I am not sure if that will be in our time. Because Spain's largest thermal power plant will soon be closing down. The turbines and boilers will shut down forever. And you will not hear anything at all.
Cool gas recirculation manifolds (boiler building, floor 7).
“The largest thermal plant in Spain will soon be silent. The turbines and the boilers will shut down and you will not hear anything at all”.
It is hard to see that an installation that has given so much for Spain and for the development of domestic industry will soon disappear. But everything must end. And if the planet is suffering from warming as a result of industrial and human activity during the last 150 years, something needs to change.
Despite the vacuum that this leaves, those of us working at As Pontes are still a family and we are very fond of the plant. We share a feeling of nostalgia for an era that is ending, but we hope that soon new sounds will soon replace the roar of the turbines.
Interior view of the boiler building (floor 8), the steam blower area and the gas suction ducts.