Gold Hard Hat Award

Front Range Power Project
Submitted by: TIC The Industrial Co.

TIC - The Industrial Co. of Steamboat Springs and Utility Engineering of Denver were teamed together in a joint venture for the complete engineering, procurement and construction of a 480 mw, gas-fired, combined cycle power plant near Fountain. The complex project is one of Colorado's largest industrial projects in recent years and the largest power project since the coal-fired plants built in the late 1970s.

The Front Range Power Project is being built by the City of Colorado Springs and El Paso Corp., specifically to shore up demand for Colorado's growing power generation needs, thus eliminating the need to purchase costly power on the open market.

The FRPP utilizes state-of-the-art equipment designed to meet very stringent environmental restrictions, including two high-efficiency General Electric combustion turbines, two heat recovery steam generators and a steam turbine. The project also incorporates a very unique piece of equipment called an air-cooled condenser that takes the place of a typical cooling tower. The ACC is approximately the length of a football field and stands nearly 100 ft. tall. It will utilize 40 large industrial fans. While typically more costly, this approach will use considerably less water than the traditional cooling tower.

TIC self-performed all major construction disciplines with more than one million man-hours of Colorado labor and a peak crew size of nearly 500 people. Although this project was fast-track in nature with a large workforce onsite, TIC was able to post an outstanding safety record, implementing some of the leading safety and training programs within the industry.

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