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Jefferson County Students get jolt of reality during visit to power plant

CAREER OPPORTUNITY: Economic Opportunities through Education by 2015 (EcO15) arranged a tour in partnership with Jefferson County High Schools, Ivy Tech Community College and Indiana Kentucky Electric. Paul de Lamerens, superintendent of the environmental department at the Indiana-Kentucky Electric Corp’s Clifty Creek Plant, gave a tour to students from Shawe Memorial High School. The tour also included students from Southwestern and Madison high schools.Peggy Vlerebome
Madison Courier Staff Writer

Learning in a classroom about power plants as potential career sites is one thing, but the experience of feeling the heat next to a boiler, clunking around in steel-toed shoe covers and seeing the ultra high-tech control center is quite another.

Twenty-five juniors and seniors from Madison, Southwestern and Shawe high schools and their chaperones toured the Indiana-Kentucky Electric Corp. power plant Thursday.

Their visit was part of an effort to recruit students for Ivy Tech Community College's three-year-old program leading to an associate degree in industrial and manufacturing technology with a concentration in power plant technology.

Several of the students said they are planning degrees in engineering, but not necessarily power plant engineering.

Before the tour, Bill James, an adjunct at Ivy Tech who teaches classes in the program, gave the students a 45-minute overview at the college. Afterward, one student expressed an interest in pursuing the degree, he said.

At the power plant, the students were divided into groups and were issued the shoe covers if they weren't already wearing steel-toed shoes, safety glasses, earplugs and hard hats.

"This is a very dangerous place," Paul A. de Lamerens, the environmental manager at the power plant and one of the group tour guides, told the students. Three students weren't allowed to go on the tour because they had worn shorts, despite an e-mail having been sent to their schools saying that shorts are prohibited in the power plant.

Outside, de Lamerens gave the students a brief history of the Clifty Creek power plant and what it does. One of the plant's byproducts was a ground cover at their feet. It is ash from the boilers and resembles obsidian, a dark natural glass formed when molten lava cools. Several hundred tons a day are produced, and 100 percent of it is used in roofing shingles, sandblasting, and on roads for ice control, de Lamerens said.

The other kind of ash produced at the plant is called fly ash, which is in the smoke. It is retrieved, and about half of it is sold, de Lamerens told the students. Fly ash almost doubles the strength to concrete it is added to, he said. The rest is disposed of in a landfill at the site.

The electricity at Clifty Creek is produced to be 15,000 volts and then is stepped up to 350,000 volts before it goes out on distribution lines. The electricity in non-appliance household outlets is 110 volts.

Before going inside the plant, de Lamerens cautioned the students to expect the temperature to be 30 degrees higher than outside on a warm day, and that the sounds would be very loud. He told them not to touch anything he didn't touch, and if he started running they should try to catch up with him.

Their first stop was a large room housing high-pressure turbines. Coal is ground, then burned to heat water in boilers, which creates steam that is piped to the turbines, which turn and make electricity.

One of the turbine wheel covers was off and it was not operating, so de Lamerens could show them how it works, shouting loudly enough to be heard above the noise in the room and to be heard by people wearing earplugs.

Each turbine wheel costs $3 million and takes two years to manufacture, he said, so they must be protected if there is a steam buildup. Below where the students were standing, he said, was a 1,000-degree steam pipe.

Part of the floor was a large grate instead of solid concrete. De Lamerens had Kevin Fry, one of the Shawe chaperones, stand on it while de Lamerens explained that a pressure valve on the steam pipe would blow off if the steam built up too much pressure, and that blowing off would protect the turbines. If that happened, de Lamerens said, the valve would fly 400 feet into the air and come crashing through where Fry was standing. It hasn't ever happened at Clifty Creek, he said, but it has elsewhere.

De Lamerens explained the electricity-making process as the tour continued, then took the students to a control room and then to a simulated control room where people are trained to work in the control room.

Computer screens, gauges and computer terminals filled the rooms. The simulator room has the same equipment, but it isn't connected to anything except Bob Amos' computer. He is the assistant shift operating engineer and is the simulator instructor. He worked in operations for 33 years before becoming the trainer.

From his computer, Amos can make an ordinary day at a power plant turn into crisis after crisis for students sitting at stations around the room. James, the instructor, takes his advanced class to Amos' simulator, and last semester the students liked it so much they insisted on a second visit.

Before going to the control room, the students were taken to a classroom where they could take off the protective glasses, earplugs and hard hats while de Lamerens gave them straight talk about being a student, a job applicant and an employee.

Students who have outside interests and extracurricular activities are more attractive than those who have only grades to show, he said, because a well-rounded student will be better able to work with other employees.

He urged them to take classes like speech to work on communication skills, because those are valuable in the workplace.

He told them attendance at work is important. "We're here to make money, not to make you happy," he said. "It's not all roses."

They will find the same attitude anywhere they work, he said. He told them they need to go to interviews clean and with a good appearance, avoid alcohol and drugs if they expect to get and keep a job, be willing to learn and to accept that a company has a certain way of doing things that they must honor.

He also told them that at the power plant, giving 100 percent is all that is acceptable. Getting a 95 percent grade, an A, is good in a school setting, but not everywhere, he said. For example, he asked the students, if a fast-food bill is $4.50 and is paid with a $10, is it acceptable to get $5.25 in change? They said no. "But that's 95 percent," he said.

James said that last semester about 30 students were enrolled in the program, which is taught at both the Madison and Lawrenceburg campuses.

 

 

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