Stanwell Power Station is a government-owned coal-fired power generation station located in

Stanwell Stanwell is a village in the Borough of Spelthorne, Spelthorne district, in Surrey, England. It is west of central London. A small corner of its land is used as industrial land for nearby Heathrow Airport. The rest of the village is made up o ...

, south-west of

Rockhampton Rockhampton is a city in the Rockhampton Region of Central Queensland, Australia. In the , the population of Rockhampton was 79,293. A common nickname for Rockhampton is "Rocky", and the demonym of Rockhampton is Rockhamptonite. The Scottish- ...

Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

. At the time of construction, it was one of the largest industrial developments undertaken in Queensland. With a capacity to generate 1,445

megawatts The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named in honor o ...

(MW), Stanwell Power Station supplies electricity for distribution to customers via the state's high voltage electricity grid.

History

The station is located on 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of land. Construction of the station took seven years, with infrastructure built to withstand cyclonic winds. The first unit at Stanwell was commissioned in 1992, and the station became fully operational in 1996.

Fuel

Coal is transport via rail from several Central Queensland coal mines. About 4 million tons of coal are used each year.

Design

There are four generating units at Stanwell Power Station. The four units and their components are housed in a 20 storey boiler house and a turbine hall the length of three football fields. The power station is highly automated and achieves both an efficient, effective workplace and high asset performance through the application of innovative technology and organisational design. These innovations have been recognised both nationally and internationally. Stanwell Power Station previously held the world record at 1,073 days of continuous operation on Unit 4.World Record for Continuous Operation
. Guinness World Records. Retrieved on 27 November 2021. This was surpassed in 2021 by Canadian public entity

Ontario Power Generation Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG) is a Crown corporations of Canada, Crown corporation and "government business enterprise" that is responsible for approximately half of the electricity generation in the province of Ontario, Canada. It is w ...

's Darlington Nuclear Generating Station Unit 1, which ran for 1,106 days continuous. The station features a 210-metre-high-chimney stack which was constructed using approximately 750,000 bricks. The station has two

cooling tower A cooling tower is a device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a coolant stream, usually a water stream, to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove heat and cool the ...

s, each stands 130 metres high (about the height of a 40-storey building) and is 100 metres in diameter. Fifteen thousand cubic metres of concrete was poured for each tower. The plume seen coming from the cooling towers is steam, lost through evaporation during the water-cooling process.

Additional facilities

The Queensland government and Stanwell decided to build a 1 MW / 10 MWh iron redox flow battery. Construction of a 300 MW / 1,200 MWh

battery storage power station A battery energy storage system (BESS), battery storage power station, battery energy grid storage (BEGS) or battery grid storage is a type of energy storage technology that uses a group of batteries in the grid to store electrical energy. Batte ...

at AU$747 million for 2027 started in 2024.

References

External links