God bless the families

Hi Mike!
If you just do a slight bit of investigating online, you'll discover that it was a Combined Cycle HRSG Natural Gas Electric generating station being built probably to reduce strain on the grid in those parts by putting it online during high peak hour demand... From the pictures I saw which weren't too good I might add, there seems to be at least two, or even maybe four units being built... The turbines in each of the units are huge, and made usually by either GE or Siemens/Westinghouse.

And from what I saw from which was an online presentation that was filmed as live but obviously wasn't, more than one of the neighboring eyewitnesses mentioned that they heard what sounded like jet engines being run, and later confirmed by the spokesperson from the utility stating that there was a crew working in the plant which was still under construction and not fully operational yet, and that one of the turbines were being tested... And the initial reports from some of the survivors was that during the "blowdown" of the natural gas piping being performed after testing, there was suddenly a huge explosion that rocked towns almost fifty miles away... This plant isn't even close to being operational yet, and it is still being constructed even though from a distance it looks like it's already online which is deceiving to say the least! :(

Here's one of the news reports online, and if you click the picture with the smoke stacks, the coverage begins:

http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/middlesex_cty/middletown-power-plant-explosion#idc-cover

It's a sad tragedy that will be investigated thoroughly I'm sure as I know that quite a few of these are being built, or planned to be constructed in very short order within the short term future. :( :( :( They are a relatively green energy plant in the sense that they are to run on natural gas, but these will be mainly used as power plants that will be only operating when peak demand in the grid needs to be supplemented by a quickly reacting surge type of power source and these puppies are just the ticket for that very type of scenario which happens more often in the majority of regions all over this great country of ours!!! :) :) :)

Finally, they are relatively cheap and efficient to operate as well as being less and less expensive to build in comparison to other types of fossil fuel type power plants and they can generate decent amounts of electricity in hundreds of megawatts in very short start-up times in comparison to older, dirtier fossil fuel power plants such as coal. When I was a Boilermaker, I worked on quite a few of them, and I'll tell you one thing... They go up way faster than the coal plants do during construction mainly because most of their major components are modular when they arrive on site...

They are only used during peak demand so they are not always fully operational where they're generating electricity into the grid, yet the caveat to that is the fact that they are usually way more reliable, and less vulnerable to spontaneous shut downs because of less than optimal maintenance... And since the price of natural gas is less than what it was when these plants first started to go online in certain regions across the country, more and more of them are popping up even more all over the place!!! :) :) ;)

Nonetheless, it's a sad day for these types of power plants, and I believe they will be going up from now on, and becoming operational in a longer time frame than what is the current scheduled deployment to being fully operational as a result of this accident. :(

Respectfully,
Henry