Managing Mountain Lodge windfarm, an engineer's perspective

Mountain Lodge Windfarm in County Cavan achieved commercial operation on Friday, October 31st.

The 31.5MW windfarm consists of 21 1.5MW General Electric wind turbines and is part of the ESB Independent Generation portfolio held by its renewable energy company, Hibernian Wind. The windfarm was built with ESBI Aertech as – client engineers and it is now operated and maintained by ESBI Facility Management (ESBI-fm).

Eadaoin Farrell, ESBI-fm's Windfarm Manager at Mountain Lodge, has been on location since June 2008 preparing the development for takeover in preparation for its commercial operation. The preparation involved familiarisation with windfarm plant, comprehensive 'snagging' of the turbines, the 110kV substation and the civil engineering infrastructure, as well as the implementation of safety and operational procedures.

Life as a windfarm site manager
Since formal takeover of the plant in November, Eadaoin has been responsible for managing the windfarm, including all Health and Safety aspects, day-to-day maintenance and operational activities. "I have always enjoyed working with renewable technologies and with ESBI," she says. "This project gives me the best of both worlds and also enables me to stay in my native county of Cavan. My role here is so diverse, as a site manager I can be involved in anything from arranging waste disposal and scheduling outages, to carrying out high voltage switching and fault-finding. One of the challenges of the role is being the only ESBI representative onsite and working on your own the majority of the time. However, the support I receive from the ESBI Facility Management renewables team is excellent."

Mountain Lodge, the facts
The Mountain Lodge site is a co-development with local developer Galetech Energy and is spread across 6km of farmland, adjacent to an existing windfarm developed by Airtricity. The turbines are connected via a 20kV underground cable network to the Ratrussan 110kV substation, which connects into the 110kV Louth to Shankill line. The substation was built to accommodate both the Hibernian Wind Power and Airtricity developments.

ESBI-fm also operates and maintains the three existing Hibernian Wind Power sites at Carnsore in Wexford, Derrybrien in Galway and Crockahenny in Donegal and it is in the process of taking over two operational sites, Blackbanks 1 and 2 in Leitrim and Carrane Hill in Sligo, which were purchased from DP Energy in October.