Just seeing what the popular opinion is for powering quarry spreads. Municipal power seems like the simplest but load management throws a wrench into it but maintaining gen-sets does not look that appealing either. What do you guys run and why?
Gensets we are portable and the nearest 3 phase highline is at least 10 miles out from the pits
Burning diesel is very expensive electricity. I see it done mostly with the portable guys that do contract work for multiple customers and various locations. All the stationary plants hook up the power lines.
It is, but for some operations, it's the only alternative. I work on drilling rigs, bouncing around west Texas and SE New Mexico. Pretty much every rig down here is setup on diesel gensets because who knows where we are going next, or if grid power even exists out there yet. Some operators are running on natural gas, but then you have to run gas pipeline before moving a rig in to a new pad and that has it's own complications too. I know of 2 rigs running on grid power. They are literally drilling in Midland/Odessa where the noise is unwanted which pretty much forced them to run on grid. Certainly not the cheapest power option though when you're burning 1000-1500 gallons of diesel a day per rig.
I suppose the first question to the OP is whether the plant that he needs to power is going to be fixed or mobile.
Let's assume fixed for now.
General rule of thumb : If it is long term - shore power. If it is going to be a short term thing that will be moved often - run a genset.
You didn't mention how many hundred thousand to run how many miles to hook up, so I'll assume you're close to adequate power lines. Then it's pretty easy to deal with load management, whatever that means in this context.
I was manager of several quarries and sand plants. All were run by shore power, as diesel generation was too expensive. At the last plant I ran, we found the local electric coop had a special deal if we used off peak power. For 3 years, we ran the plant screening/washing operation at night from May1, until Oct.1. The loading/shipping, stripping took place during the day. Our electric savings was huge each year we did this. You might want to see if your local power company offers any deals like this.
Kohler company in Kohler, Wisconsin used to do the same thing in their iron foundry. They only needed 10-12 hours of production at that plant to keep up, so they only ran their electric arc furnaces from like 9pm to 7 am (something like that, might have been 7pm to 7am). I forget the exact figures, but it cost them around half to run the furnace at night compared to 'peak' hours.
So did Alton Steel even when known as Laclede Steel as far as Off Peak power for the melt pots. Every Quarry I worked in years ago was direct supply major electricity supplier, three phase and had their own substation as most were well off the beaten path.
I do industrial electrical work for a living. We have two large silica quarries we take care of. Its all 13.8Kv highline out to mobile buildings on skids with transformers that step it down to 480 volt 3 phase and from there we run all the crushers and belts. When they move stuff we just move the highline to accommodate and they drag the buildings around with a 988 Cat. The initial cost to get the highline down into the quarries would have been a lot, but now the moves where we add a few poles and a few thousand feet of line would quickly pay for themselves over diesel power in the 24/7 environment.