John Cockerill Hamon has reported successful completion of a large air cooled condenser (ACC) for Siemens Energy’s 1100 MWe Sun Ba II combined cycle project in Taiwan.
The plant employs two SGT6-9000HL gas turbines and is being developed by current owner Sun Ba Power. It can be seen as part of Taiwan’s plan to move away from dependence on coal and nuclear towards flexible gas-fired power generation and renewables.
John Cockerill Hamon says it built the 48-module (eight rows of six modules each) air cooled condenser in only 12 months, noting that “it usually takes twice as long to erect equipment of such magnitude.” The rapid construction time was made possible thanks to an innovative way of erecting the modules that allowed significant reduction in assembly time, the company says. The use of John Cockerill Hamon’s Building Integrated Modelling (BIM), with both cooling system contractor and customer having the “same tool environment”, was an important contributor and helped speed up the engineering phase.
The design had to meet rigorous seismic requirements, reviewed and certified by a third party and “our innovation outstandingly proved its worth during Taiwan’s earthquake of April 2024,” says John Cockerill Hamon.
