Valley Medical Center -- Cogeneration Not The Culprit

Your story on Dec. 6, "Power play: How its new $5.9 million power plant brought a hospital to its knees," is at best, misleading, and at worst, incorrect.

I have been involved in some of the cogeneration plant development and construction and have some familiarity with the actual facts. Many parts of the story do not at all agree with the facts as I know them.

The headline is not correct. The evacuation of Valley Medical Center was forced by the failure of the emergency generators, not the new cogeneration plant. Every hospital is required to be equipped with emergency generators to supply power to critical circuits within the hospital whenever power supplies fail. As the article notes in passing, these generators failed and were the cause of the evacuation as required by state regulations.

The cogeneration plant was built to reduce the hospital's purchased electricity bill of about $1 million per year. The cogeneration plant used natural gas to generate electricity and used heat from the engines' generators to heat the buildings and provide hot water. This type of generation is more efficient and reduces greenhouse effect. In fact, it is encouraged by special federal legislation. Since gas is much cheaper than electricity, the hospital did in fact save approximately $500,000 in energy costs in the first year of cogeneration operation.

The incident reported in the article demonstrated that the cogeneration plant "island" controls and computer programming were not correct. It was not possible to properly simulate a Puget Sound Energy outage during the plant testing the previous year. The controls were corrected after the incident. Since that incident, the Puget Sound Energy power supply to Valley was lost during the wind storm on Nov. 23. The cogeneration plant operated properly providing power during the utility outage and then reconnecting after power was restored.

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport does not have a cogeneration plant and remained without power for about five hours. This incident happened before the article was published. Why was it not included for balance in the article?

Valley Medical Center, Richard Roodman, Ome Almeda and the commissioners should be applauded for doing all the right things by implementing the environmentally friendly and highly efficient cogeneration technology.

It is obvious to individuals in the energy business that your article is very much slanted to favor Puget Sound Energy. The facts about the cogeneration plant had to be slanted to do so. The Seattle Times did a disservice to its readers and hurt its own credibility among those who know the real story or are in the industry.

We the readers want to rely on the newspaper for reasonably reliable information that we use in our everyday lives. An inaccurate and slanted article such as this comes as a serious personal disappointment.

Terrence J. Heil President, Wieland Lindgren Engineers