POWER December 2010 - 48

PLANT SAFETY
Investigating the
Sayano-Shushenskaya
Hydro Power
Plant Disaster
Courtesy: Reuters
The destruction of the turbines and auxiliary equipment at Russia's Sayano-Shushenskaya
Hydro Power Plant in August 2009 claimed the lives of 75 workers and
wrecked an indispensable source of electricity that will take years to fully restore.
The disaster, as this report explains, was predictable and preventable.
By Alexander Boyko and Sergey Popov, EKRA-Sibir Ltd. and Nemanja Krajisnik, Siemens Transmission and Distribution Ltd.
I
t was early Monday morning August 17,
2009, at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydro
Power Plant (SSH), which is located on the
Yenisei River, near Sayanogorsk in the Republic
of Khakassia, in the southern region of
the Russian Federation. By 8:00 a.m., technicians
were operating multiple hydroelectric
turbines at the plant, including Unit 2, and
plant maintenance work on other equipment
was continuing. Other members of the plant
staff were arriving or having a final cup of
coffee with colleagues before beginning the
new work week. Overall, the plant was performing
reasonably well in spite of the many
nagging maintenance problems. In fact, just
over a month earlier (July 2), RusHydro Public
Corp. (RusHydro), the owner and operator
of SSH, announced that the plant had set
an all-time 24-hour electricity production record.
Thirteen minutes later the plant lay in
rubble and 75 workers had lost their lives.
Regional Powerhouse
RusHydro, with its 55 hydro plants, is the
48
leading power company in Russia by installed
capacity (25.4 GW) and the second-largest
hydroelectric power company in the world,
after Canada's Hydro-Québec. RusHydro
was established in December 2004 as part of
Russia's privatization movement, although
most of its shares (about 60%) are owned by
the Russian government. The energy generated
by SSH, about 23.5 TWh annually, was
about one-quarter of that produced by RusHydro's
resources for the Unified Energy
Systems of Russia and Siberia. About 70%
of the energy generated by RusHydro goes
to United Company Rusal's aluminum smelters,
which produce about 12% of the world's
aluminum.
With its 10 turbines, SSH was RusHydro's
largest hydroelectric power station and the
sixth-largest in the world, based on installed
capacity. In fact, SSH was once included in
Guinness World Records as a plant with the
most durable dam in the world. At 6,400
MW, SSH was also the largest of the hydroelectric
plants positioned along the Yenisei
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River basin. The Yenisei is a river that forms
in Mongolia and flows through Siberia to the
north before emptying into the Arctic Ocean.
Other plants on the river include the 12 x
500-MW Krasnoyarsk (in seventh place) and
the 3 x 107-MW Mayna hydro power plants
(Figure 1).
At the start of construction in 1961, SSH
was the largest hydro power plant in the
world. The length of the completed dam is
1,066 meters (m), and it rises 242 m above
the river floor. The width of the dam is
105.7 m at its base and 25 m on the ridge.
The dam itself is of the arch-gravity type, a
design where the center of the dam extends
upstream and ends arch back in order to direct
most of the hydrostatic force against the
canyon walls (Figure 2). The maximum capacity
of the spillway is 13,600 m3
/sec (3.6
million gallons/sec). The project's turbine
gallery housed 10 turbine units, each rated at
640 MW but each capable of peaking up to
720 MW. Rated head for each of the hydro
turbines was 192 m.
POWER | December 2010

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POWER December 2010

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