There’s something relaxed and slightly rock ‘n’ roll about APR Energy and Edmund Campion, the company’s director of R&D.
It could be the company’s roots. Or it could just be the gung-ho appeal of shipping large complex pieces of machinery to almost anywhere in the world and building them up into power plants in a matter of weeks.
Edmund’s brother John Campion co-founded their first mobile power business, Showpower, in 1987 to provide electricity to some of the largest concerts and sporting events of the time. GE purchased Showpower in 1999. John Campion and Laurence Anderson then founded APR Energy in 2004. The company has since grown to employ more than 500 people in 10 countries.
APR Energy specialises in providing large amounts of temporary power at short notice. It has 2.4GW of capacity installed in more than 25 countries around the world. There’s 300MW in Uruguay, 450MW of gas turbines in Libya and 150MW in Senegal. There are installations in Uruguay, Argentina, the US Virgin Islands, Iraq, Libya, Angola, Myanmar, and the South Pacific. “Some of these places are great, some of them are places you don't necessarily want to hang around in. In Iraq and Libya we have to operate a very tight security regime,” says Campion.
When its not working for utilities in developing economies, APR Energy is providing emergency power for places recovering from natural disasters. Examples include providing generators in Japan after the Tsunami and Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in 2011.
The company works to 50, 90 or 120 day schedules, during which it will provide a turnkey installation. The customer has to provide a suitable piece of land and the permits, and APR Energy will do the logistics, installation, commissioning, civil works, all the engineering and bring the power online. It supplies two main types of technologies – either gas or diesel reciprocating engines in 6MW blocks, or 25MW aeroderivative gas turbines, the TM2500 made by GE. The two systems are scalable to more than 400MW.
The key technology is APR’s patented modularisation of the plant, which enables its rapid assembly and disassembly. The latest version of the technology has halved the build time for power plants of 50MW and above. In Oman recently the firm’s engineers installed a 32MW power plant in less than two weeks and took it apart in just eight days. The fastest a turbine generator has been installed is two weeks for a single 25MW turbine supplied to EDF in Martinique.
“A lot of it is logistics, the biggest amount of time is mobilising through sea freight to the sites,” says Campion. “It can be done faster but you will pay a premium for moving large amounts of equipment on Antonovs. It depends on how critical the need is and how much you are willing to spend.
“The other side is having an engineering team that understands the tools we have and how to solve the customer's problems. That could be flexibility in transformation up to the voltage requirements, or flexibility in the generation assets on the site.”
Campion’s ongoing R&D goal is to make the company’s plant even more transportable. Each turbine or engine block can be moved ten times over its lifetime, which means breaking it down and storing it for transport is just as important as building it. The company is also looking at different generating technologies, including fuel cells and renewables as part of its business development plan to help customers build longer term power sources. “Fuel flexibility is also key. The world out there is looking at different options in fuels, and we want to deliver that choice in our prime movers,” he says.
The company has also recently taken a step-up in remote monitoring terms, centralising the data from its fleet of turbines into a single control room at its headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida. Campion says: “There are hundreds of data points on a gas turbine. A person can't be looking at that and trending it. Our back-office IT infrastructure pulls that data all the time from our units globally and delivering actions from the information it is digesting.
“It enables us to be proactive rather than reactive. We can push out algorithms to all our equipment simultaneously. It gives us consistency across the fleet and another tool the on-site operators can use to understand their units on site.”
The global trend is that there are more countries short of power, which is a good thing for APR Energy. Campion says: “The whole premise of temporary power is that the utility or government hasn't kept up with demand and infrastructure maintenance in their country. If they had, we wouldn't have a business.
“We are still seeing a lot of governments putting out tenders for temporary power. Even industrialised stable economies like the UK, where they are taking all their assets offline to comply with emissions regulations and nothing has been done to replace it.”
APR Energy’s main competition in the temporary power market is Aggreko. Campion says APR Energy’s main difference is that it is focused on providing large amounts of power to utilities. “We don't see ourselves in the Aggreko sandbags one or two MW customers. It's large power with all the balance of plant.
“Some of our technology is similar with gas and diesel recips, but we also have the turbines, which Agrekko doesn't have today. There is no way a diesel recip can touch a turbine for emissions.”
While the world’s insatiable hunger for energy exists and is combined with brinkmanship and ineptitude from governments and power utilities, there is probably space in the market for both firms for a good while yet.