BIRTH OF POWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1034, 26 July 1930, Page 6

BIRTH OF POWER

Eerie Scenes at King’s Wharf Station

WONDERS OF MECHANISM

Hiss of escaping steam . . . the perpetual roar of machinery . . . furnaces white-hot . . . alert engineers and sweating firemen. In City streets, homes and shops not far away the soft glow of a myriad electric lights. . . . There is romance in the birthplace of Auckland’s electric power—the station near King’s Wharf. As darkness descends over the City and the harbour’s veil of blue Is dotted with globes of light a chart in the station at King’s Wharf is starting its upward track. More and more power is being used —lights, cooking stoves, trams —all are absorbing this vital energy. Now that Arapunl is silent and deserted all that power must be generated by steam from King’s Wharf. One might almost call it the nervecentre of Auckland. The station is a strange, unreal place to the casual visitor, but to those silent, alert engineers its turbines and clock-faces, its intricate mechanism and its pulsating machinery are as the pages of a well-thumbed book on engineering. FEEDING IN THE COAL Water-power is no longer available. Auckland’s electricity must be generated by steam. Steam means coal — huge quantities of it, and a never-end-ing supply. Trucks of coal trundle toward the station and stop underneath a crane and a grab. That is the first process one comes on when visiting the station at &.30 p.m., just when the greatest amount of power is required for the City. This coal —slack from the W’aikato mines and from far-away Westport—is emptied from the trucks on to a wide-moving belt which carries it toward the main building. Then, by various processes, it reaches a neverending chain of buckets which lifts it to the bunkers high up near the roof above the furnaces. From here the coal drops down again to bo fed into the lurnace-flames by an automatic process. How those furnaces eat the coal. Between 450 and 500 tons a day are required to produce Auckland's electric power. In a slow-moving mass, five inches thick, it is fed automatically into the furnaces, never once touched by hand from the time it arrives in the power station. There are four huge boilers, with three furnaces to each boiler. One thinks, for a moment, of Dante’s Inferno, but there are no lost souls in this house of industry. Blasts of cold night air seem like spring in the heat. WHITE HEAT

Chain grates, for ever moving, feed coal into the flames. Each furnace, viewed through only a small aperture, Is white-hot—so hot that bricks are melted. White flame licks into the moving mass of coal which is first Ignited by the appalling heat of the bricks above it. Periodically, the stokers remove clinker, so that the fires inside may not reduce the required amount of steam. The scream of escaping steam is the signal that the time is opportune. Two stokers, their faces streaming with sweat in the lurid glare, slip open small doors and with long, iron rods prod the blazing white mass inside. The pull of a lever and the clinker is removed. It must all be done as quickly as possible—the pressure of steam in those boilers must never fall below a certain level. That boiler room is an eerie world with its ceaseless roar, fitful gleams of white light, smoke and chains and pipes disappearing into the dimness above. Each boiler carries a pressure of 2251 b of steam to the square inch. The ideal mixture of coal to produce the necessary heat is a mixture of Waikato and Westport —one slow-burning and the other fast. THE TELL-TALE CHART

High overhead are the bunkers from which the coal falls down to be fed into the furnaces. They will hold 1,000 tons, but the demand is so great that they are never full. During the day the power station is comparatively quiet—that is, compared with its enormous output for the evening. Soon after 4 o'clock in the afternoon the tell-tale chart which shows the amount of power being U“ed begins to wobble slowly upward. Every furnace is then brought into operation. The chart needle continues to rise steadily until 7 o’clock, when the peak-load qf power is required. After that it ft As away again until the early morning when the first trams start to run, and another day of power-producing begins. SAVING THE STEAM

Few people realise that even the steam is saved at the power station. It goes through the boilers again and again and the loss is so little that only 8 per cent, of water from the City main is used to' make up the losses. After leaving the boilers and expending its force in turning the turbines which produce electric power, the steam returns to a condenser, becomes water again and goes back into the boilers. But before doing so it passes through a water economiser. This explains itself almost. The economisers are above the furnaces, the heat from which also heats the economisers so that the water is almost at boiling point before it goes back into the boilers. This device saves an enormous amount of coal.

From the grime and the glare of the engine-room one passes into another world of mechanism, where the electric power is actually produced. Here the noise is almost deafening. Turbines are whirling at the rate of 3,000 revolutions a minute, each generating 5,000 k.w. There are giant fly-wheels each weighing 10 tons, revolving so rapidly that they seem to be motionless. There are huge an-’ intricate machines so perfectly made' that they adjust themselves, but how that is done only the engineers can tell. There are rows and rows of switchboards along one side of the room, each with a red and rather dangerouslooking eye. There are cables and gleaming masses of iron. Outside, in the cold street, the lights are burning without a flicker; in hundreds of rooms radiators give out a steady heat which never alters; the evening meal cooks briskly in the tidy stove; phantom figures talk from screens. When the King’s Wharf station first operated it took six weeks to generate 1,000,000 units of power. Under present conditions that total is reached in three days. And what is more wonderful, only 13 men are required to maintain this vast birthplace of power. Over them Mr. H. G. Davis and Mr. S. R. Bach, the senior shift engineers, keep j watchful eyes. I