Ernest Henry Mining, Australia

Located in north-west Queensland, Ernest Henry Mine is a Copper and Gold extraction and processing facility. Operational since 1998, it is a part of the integrated metals business of Glencore, a leading mining & minerals company in Australia.

Crushed ore from the underground mine is processed onsite to produce Copper concentrate at Ernest Henry Mine. The operation deploys up to 1200 meters of overland and below surface conveyors that transport ore for processing.

The motors operating the conveyors at this facility are a potential source of poor power quality. During operation, they can draw high reactive power and generate harmonic pollution in the network, thereby decreasing plant productivity and attracting penalties from power utility.

In 1997, Ernest Henry Mine installed Power Grids’ metal enclosed capacitor bank as a solution to mitigate power quality issues. The solution improved the power factor of the mining facility, by compensating reactive power demand of motors, to the value defined by utility. This resulted into the improvement of efficiency and elimination of penalties for the facility.

After 20 years, at the end of its life, the solution has been replaced by the new ABBACUS-E series metal enclosed capacitor bank. This new solution from Hitachi Energy is compact, modular, and automatically compensates reactive power demand in network to maintain power factor to a pre-set level. It can also filter out harmonics to a specific level.

With the new power quality solution, Ernest Henry Mining can continue to operate with a high-power factor and avoid being exposed to the costs of poor power quality for many more years to come.