It has been announced that Voith Hydro has been given the contract to rehabilitate and upgrade all the turbines in the 10-unit powerhouse at Grant County, Washington’s Public Utility District’s (PUD) Priest Rapids Dam on the Columbia River.
The project, which includes the installation of the upgraded vertical Kaplan turbines, will span the better part of a decade starting 2016 with one unit being upgraded per year. The majority of the rehab work will take place at Voith’s York, Pennsylvania facility. Over the past several years, Voith has performed model testing but that ended with a successful customer witness test that took place in Lausanne, Switzerland in June 2013. Each turbine is 100MW.
Cavitation free performance and stringent fish passage criteria were very important components for the final awarded design of the turbine. With the award of the Priest Rapids contract, Voith is modernizing components of a hydropower plant on the Columbia River; the company recently completed the final turbine upgrade at the 10-unit Wanapum Dam, which is immediately upstream from Priest Rapids.