Challenge

Florida Power & Light (FPL) needed reliable water treatment equipment to produce boiler feed water at its Cape Canaveral plant, but faced the following challenges:

• Less staff available to operate and maintain the plant's existing automatic regenerable deionizers
• A need to reduce costs
• The desire to eliminate chemical handling and disposal at the site

Solution

Siemens Water Technologies, formerly USFilter, and FPL entered into a long-term agreement under which Siemens provides boiler feed water to the plant on a cost-per-1,000-gallon basis.  FPL supplies the raw water, electricity and storage tank.  Siemens  supplies the equipment and also operates and maintains the plant.  This ensures a continuous supply of boiler feed water that meets FPL's specifications of 2 megohm-cm quality water with 10 parts per billion (ppb) or less of silica.  Operation and maintenance costs are reduced, and there is no chemical handling or disposal required.

Siemens built the metal building that houses the water treatment system, installed the equipment, started up the system, and has been operating it continuously since 1995.  The 100-gallon-per-minute system includes: polymer injection; two 54-cubic foot multi-media filters; 54-cubic foot softener; bisulfite injection for chlorine removal; caustic injection for pH adjustment; twelve 30-inch 1-micron prefilters; reverse osmosis (RO) system; two FlexTrex® mixed-bed service deionizers.

Results

Before the agreement with Siemens, FPL had five of their own technicians operating the water treatment plant.  Now they rely on a Siemens service technician who comes in once a week, or more often if needed, and changes the filters.  FPL has partnered with Siemens Water Technologies to design, build, own and operate water treatment plants at six other facilities: Fort Myers, Manatee, Port Everglades, Putnam, Riviera, and Sanford, as a way to operate more efficiently and improve electrical service to customers.