Engineer body seeks Hooda’s intervention

YOGINDRA MOHAN
Patiala

All India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF) has requested Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda to impress upon Reliance Infra and Shanghai China to attend the design and construction defects at their cost leading to the turbine failure at Yamunanagar thermal plant. Padamjit Singh, Chairman, AIPEF, has written to the Chief Minister Hooda, saying that the Chinese made turbine supplied by Reliance Infra suffered a major failure due to the faulty design and construction. Last year after the outage of unit on September 25 caused by the entry of water into the turbine resulted in bending of the rotor. Now, the deformed turbine rotor has been sent to Baroda repair.

An enquiry committee constituted by the Haryana Power Generation Corporation Limited (HPGCL) investigated the incident, which has found that high pressure as well as low pressure drains of turbine were connected to a common header instead of having separate headers as per normal practice. After the enquiry committee report was finalised in November 2011, no action has been taken by the HPGCL to attend to or rectify the design and construction lapses due to which the turbine failure occurred. “The final takeover of the units has not yet been achieved, there is a clear cut case for the Reliance Infra and the Chinese manufacturer to rectify and attend the design and construction lapses on their part for both the units at their cost,” Padamjit Singh has stated in the letter, saying that the first unit at Yamunanagar is also on breakdown and outage due to turbine vibrations.