POWER February 2014 - 20

Upgraded Control Room
Consoles Improve
Ergonomics
Great River Energy (GRE) is a not-forprofit
electric cooperative that generates
and transmits power for 28 member cooperatives
throughout southern, central,
and northern Minnesota and northwestern
Wisconsin. With a generating capacity of
more than 1,100 MW, Coal Creek Station
in Underwood, N.D., is the cooperative's
largest power plant.
The plant operates two boilers fueled by
lignite coal, which is supplied by nearby
Falkirk Mine. Lignite is a softer coal that
contains higher water content than other
types of coal. GRE uses a patented coalrefining
process called DryFining, which
utilizes waste heat from the plant to dry
and refine the coal, making it burn cleaner
and more efficiently.
Recently, GRE upgraded the consoles
in the control room at Coal Creek Station
to improve ergonomics for workers
monitoring plant operations (Figure 1).
The primary reason for the upgrade was
to improve the operators' sightlines to the
top row of monitors in the control room.
In order to see the top monitors, operators
were tilting their heads too far back
and experiencing eyestrain from trying to
focus on information on the screens.
Team Effort
GRE worked with Winsted Corp. to design
and install new ergonomic consoles. In order
to eliminate any need to drill holes
in the floor or move wires or cabling, the
new consoles needed to fit the existing
footprint and floor penetrations.
" The control room upgrade was really a
team effort between our operations, electrical
and instrumentation, IT, safety and
management staff and Winsted Custom Division
along with their installation team, "
said Mark Baisch, control room operator at
Coal Creek Station. Together, Winsted and
GRE created a design that includes three
custom Matrix-Evo consoles in a horseshoe
formation.
1. Coal Creek Station distributed control system console. Courtesy: Winsted
Corp.
Two of the consoles sit back-to-back,
with each controlling one of the two power
generation units (Figure 2). They are
laid out identically, so regardless of which
unit an operator is controlling, the process
is the same. For instance, the turbine
generator control is always on the left
no matter which console you are facing.
Each of these consoles has five monitors
mounted to it, plus the operator's local
area network computer.
The third console controls the coalrefining
process. It's a bit smaller than
the other consoles and has only four stations,
but otherwise it houses the same
equipment. The reason for this is that the
control system is operator-based, which
means operators can run any of the controls
from any of the three workstations,
depending on how they log in.
More Than Just Aesthetics
To improve sightlines and reduce physical
stress to operators, Winsted followed
ergonomic standards for control room design
outlined in ISO 1106. The monitors
on each of the consoles are mounted several
inches below the work surface using a
unique, track-style mounting system. The
system uses an integrated horizontal aluminum
track, which enables easy adjustment
of post-mounted brackets.
While the vast majority of the control
system is digital and controlled via computer,
there are a number of hard panel
switches mounted to the console that
20
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POWER | February 2014
2. Coal Creek Station control room. Courtesy: Winsted Corp.
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POWER February 2014

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