Melbourne Water Greenvale Pump Station

GHD was appointed by Melbourne Water Corporation to provide detailed design and total project management on a new water pump station at being built at Greenvale. The station is set to meet current and future water demands. The pump station provides capacity for up to five 500kW pump sets with the initial installation comprising four 300kW pump sets. The project also included installation of a 1500kVA standby generator.

GHD completed the full detailed designed of a new electrical motor control centre/main switchboard, all electrical schematic drawings and tender documentation and undertook tender assessment and selection. After the contract was awarded, GHD provided full contract superintendent services and technical supervision of construction including witness commissioning.

Features of the project included:

• Fully automatic and totally unattended operation
• GHD’s design of the electrical and control system maximises pump availability by providing a design that isolates failures of individual components to effect a minimum number of pumps
• A new MCC with bus-bar rating of 3000A to house control system and pump starters and distribution equipment including air-circuit breakers for main switches
• The MCC provides maximum availability of pumps by use of dual supply transformers with a split bus with bus-tie
• Pump station is controlled by a programmable logic controller (PLC) with a graphical operator display unit
• Off site remote telemetry supervisory control and data acquistion (SCADA) system for extensive monitoring of pump station performance with remote control capabilities.
• 1500 KVA standby generator with control of the MCC air-circuit breakers to provide automatic connection of the generator on loss of mains power
• Pump starters are soft starters with power factor correction equipment and power monitoring units to control the power factor correction equipment (via the PLC)
• The pump station is operated from a tank remotely located off site with tank level transmitted to the pump station via a radio telemetry link