2024 collapse of support infrastructure<\/a> at Algoma Steel, the Sault steelmaker is now hoping for another payout after an unplanned electrical outage that halted steelmaking for 12 days.<\/p>\n“Look, the outage at Lake Superior was unplanned,” Michael Moraca, Algoma’s chief financial officer, told a meeting of stock analysts and institutional investors.<\/p>\n
“We had a premature failure of one of our turbines. You know, we have the ability also to hopefully get some insurance proceeds because of that failure. So we’ll be working on those as we adjudicate through the process,” Moraca said.<\/p>\n
On Aug. 17, an abnormal condition was detected in one of three turbines at Algoma Steel’s Lake Superior Power [LSP] plant, a 55-megawatt facility built to supplement Algoma\u2019s supply of power and steam for its steelworks operation including two new electric arc furnaces.<\/p>\n
That turbine was automatically taken offline.<\/p>\n
The other two turbines were not affected, Moraca said.<\/p>\n
The three General Electric gas turbines used by Lake Superior Power are essentially modified jet engines as first used on aircraft from manufacturers like\u00a0McDonnell\u00a0Douglas, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and\u00a0Kawasaki.<\/p>\n
In addition to aviation and industrial uses, they’re also widely used for marine applications including military amphibious ships.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 30, Algoma commissioned a replacement turbine, bringing Lake Superior Power back to full generating capability.<\/p>\n
“Algoma brought a leased turbine into service so repairs can be made to the problem turbine.<\/p>\n
Cost of the new turbine and its power station is expected to be about US$35 million.<\/p>\n
The company says the leased turbine is expected to be installed during the fourth quarter of 2026.<\/p>\n
That installation isn’t expected to interrupt Algoma’s steelmaking.<\/p>\n
“We really think that bringing the third turbine is the right move from a redundancy perspective,” Moraca said during a conference call.<\/p>\n
“It also mitigated further downtime that we might have had at the LSP outage during the previous quarter, and bringing that that third turbine into the mix provides us not only additional redundancy, but opportunities in the future if we can generate more power, depending on the market conditions in the power environment here in Ontario.<\/p>\n
“So we think it’s a prudent move. These are not losing value. The turbines are very very hard to get. We were fortuitous to be able to have access to this turbine, and we’re excited that we have that redundancy now,” Moraca said.<\/p>\n
Moraca made those remarks while replying to tough questions from James McGarragle of RBC Capital Markets about whether the turbine incident might suggest Algoma needs to pay more attention to maintaining existing assets.<\/p>\n
“Were\u00a0there any structural implications here?\u00a0Does this potentially suggest the Lake Superior Power facility was undercapitalized? Any potential for further unplanned outages as we look into next year? Was this kind of truly like a one-off situation?”\u00a0McGarragle asked.<\/p>\n
Moraco said that adding a third turbine is right thing to do, when viewed\u00a0from a redundancy perspective.<\/p>\n
“So, we think it is a prudent move. These are not losing value. The turbines are very hard to get. We were fortuitous to be able to have access to this turbine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The General Electric gas turbine that failed at Lake Superior Power is essentially a modified jet engine first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":954401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48,326318],"class_list":["post-954400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-turbinealgoma-steel-group-inc-lake-superior-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/954401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}