Lines of history: Vladimir Ivanovich BYCHKOV, Deputy Director for Major Construction at CHPP-2 until his retirement

In our family, my grandfather Nikolai Ivanovich Bychkov was the first to pave the way into the energy sector. He lived in Novokuznetsk, but in 1933 he and his family decided to move to Alma-Ata to work on the construction of CHPP-1. There was a lot of enthusiasm at the time, and the demand for workers was high. He got a job as a carpenter and concrete worker. Those were difficult times, and the work was hard: there were almost no machines, and concrete work was done by hand for 12 hours a day.

They lived in special barracks for workers. Unfortunately, in 1937, my grandfather was charged with being an ‘enemy of the people.’ One of the neighbors wrote that he was spreading anti-Soviet propaganda – expressing dissatisfaction with the living conditions in the barracks. For this, he was sentenced to 10 years.

My father was only 11 years old at the time. His fate was not easy: during the war, as a very young teenager, he worked as a turner at the Kirov military factory. After the war, he served in the Sevastopol Navy. My first encounter with the energy industry took place in early childhood, in 1961. We lived near CHPP-1, where there was a cooling pond where my friend Kolya and I went fishing. Now there is a water heating boiler room and a pumping station there. Back then, you could even walk up to the workshops. And we children felt a sense of enormous power from the station. Later, my friend Nikolai Pivovarov worked as the head of the boiler shop at CHPP-1. Unfortunately, he died in an accident when the station was being converted to gas.

After school, I enrolled at the Almaty Energy Institute, specializing in thermal power stations, and graduated in 1976. I was assigned to work for a year at Kazenergonladka. Then I came to Almaty CHPP-1 as a boiler room attendant. A year later, I was drafted into the army, served for a year as a lieutenant, and then received the rank of senior lieutenant.

In 1980, after the army, I joined Almaty CHPP-2 as a repair technician for the start-up boiler room equipment. At that time, only the boiler and turbine had been installed. The main building, consisting of one boiler, was completed. Construction of the building for the second boiler began. I remember that in September 1980, the first turbine was started up, and the second turbine was being installed.

To start up the turbines, steam had to be supplied. The start-up boiler room was installed in the western part. And we supplied steam to the main building. The steam boilers burned fuel oil. The steam produced in the start-up boiler room was used to heat the fuel oil. Before that, there were many preliminary start-ups – the equipment had to be run in. The start-up operations themselves were delayed, and there were many modifications.

The start-up of the PT-80 turbine with a steam capacity of 420 tons per hour was a very big event. The main characteristics of the boiler were impressive: steam capacity, temperature 560 degrees. And in the course of further operation, they were maintained.

I remember that the city leadership was invited to the start-up of the boiler, and there were curators from the relevant ministry. The start-up operations were difficult, as it was a BKZ-420 modification boiler, which did not yet exist in the Soviet Union at that time. In addition, the station itself is located in an earthquake-prone area, so it was designed specifically for this purpose. The building structures provided protection against dynamic impacts of up to 9 points.

The boiler was manufactured by the Barnaul Boiler Plant. The designers – KazNIPI energoprom Sibenergomash – worked on it jointly. The station has seven Barnaul boilers. The eighth boiler is from the Podolsk plant. At the time, it was built to modify the BKZ-7S boiler. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its construction was suspended.

Nevertheless, the main body was prepared: reinforced concrete and steel structures were installed. They were used later, many years later, in the design and construction of boiler No.8 of CHPP-2. Although the first boilers of 1978-1980 and the boilers of 2014-2015 were different. In later modifications, other burner devices were designed. Since the level of nitrogen emissions depends on their operation, special measures were taken to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. The new equipment is equipped with electronics and a modern control system.

When construction of the thermal power plant began, and then its commissioning, personnel were recruited from across the Soviet Union. Moreover, according to the procedures for capital construction, housing had to be provided along with the commissioning of an industrial facility. This was legalized and included in the budget. Therefore, at the same time, Alma-Ata CHPP-2 was involved in housing construction and the construction of social and cultural facilities. At one time, we had a sanatorium-preventorium, and social issues for employees were resolved as far as possible. Therefore, specialists and workers were highly motivated to go to work at CHPP-2 to earn an apartment.

When I later became deputy director for capital construction, I was also involved in housing construction. When the housing was commissioned, we went through all the legal and technological procedures and obtained the relevant documents from the city authorities. Everything was in accordance with the applicable standards and requirements, and people received ownership of their flats.

The second phase of the station’s construction lasted from 1984 to 1989. At that time, four more steam boilers were built and commissioned: BKZ-420-140-7C, one R-50-130/13 steam turbine and two PT-110/120-130-5 steam turbines. In total, between 1980 and 1988, seven boilers of the same model were installed at CHPP-2.

When I worked as a master at the start-up boiler room, boilers 1 and 2 were in operation. The start-up boiler room was reduced in size – it was a small thermal station on the railway line – two trains. It included boilers, chemical water treatment, deaerators. The procedure was as follows: the boiler was started in Almaty, and the train arrived at our station. It was started in Tashkent, and it arrived there. The Ministry of Energy had a department that dealt with start-up boiler rooms.

After the start-up boiler room, I worked in the boiler shop as a foreman and deputy head. At that time, one of the pressing issues was fuel oil consumption. The main fuel is a pulverized coal mixture. But during start-up and transition modes, fuel oil is used, which is supplied through nozzles.

The cost of fuel oil was significant. Our station did not comply with Soviet Union standards, so measures had to be taken. It was a complex issue, and it was not just about the equipment. The boiler operating mode, which had to be adjusted, played a major role. We succeeded: we raised the level of operation and repair of equipment that affected fuel oil combustion. Regulations on staff motivation were also developed. If you saved fuel oil, you received a certain percentage of the reward. It was an organizational, financial and technical approach. It brought results.

Later, as a foreman and deputy head, I dealt with organizational and technical issues. We tried to ensure that the equipment worked reliably.

I was responsible for high-pressure fittings – feed water and steam valves, which often broke down. No inventions were needed there, but it was necessary to organize scheduled preventive maintenance. Once a week, the team would go out and clean and flush everything, apply new lubricant, and measure all the clearances to ensure the boiler worked reliably.

But even we couldn’t avoid serious emergencies. In February 1986, the largest accident in the Alma-Ata energo system occurred. It was caused by failure to comply with regulatory requirements for insulation cleaning. In other words, routine maintenance was not carried out on the networks. Insulation breakdowns occurred, and in such situations the system protects itself: if there is a damaged section, it shuts it down. In other words, the protection saved the equipment, but cut off the power to the networks. Later, when power was supplied to TPP-2 from the Kapchagai HPP and the Cascade HPP, the station, in turn, supplied power to the network, and the entire system gradually started up.

In 1992, I was invited to take up the position of Deputy Director for Capital Construction. One of the issues that needed to be resolved quickly was the condition of the ash dump. The fact is that Almaty TPP-2 burns 2 million tons of coal every year. This produces around one million tons of ash. The ash is stored in ash dumps, which have limited space. Therefore, the question arose not only of building a new ash dump, but also of modernizing the storage system as a whole. This included taking environmental requirements into account.

We burned Ekibastuz coal with a high ash content. For every ton of coal delivered, 400 kg of ash had to be stored. In winter, a maximum of 10,000 tons of coal (167 railcars) is burned per day, and in summer, 3-4,000 tons. And the ash has to be stored somewhere.

But at that time, there was a difficult situation with land allocation. Together with scientists, we proposed the principle of dry storage to solve the problem. I worked on this issue for three years, during which time I had to conduct negotiations at the level of the head of the administration of the Kaskelen district of the Almaty region.

As a result, in order to solve this problem, the city organized a meeting at the ash dump. Prime Minister Sergei Tereshchenko, Akimat employees and land managers were invited to attend. Tereshchenko told us at the time: ‘If you don’t sign the documents within a week, we will part ways.’ But we already had the documents ready from all the authorities. Ten days later, the documents were signed, we were allocated 200 hectares of arable land, and we began work on the gold dump.

One of the most important problems in large-scale construction was the organisation of uninterrupted work on the gold dump. But an even more important issue was the construction of boiler No.8 in its original version. We had already completed the procurement process and received some of the equipment from the supplier factories. Accordingly, housing was introduced in parallel with industrial construction. This required daily, constant monitoring. Housing construction was on the title list for the second phase of CHPP-2. From 1992 to 1996, 274 families of CHPP-2 energy workers received apartments. Unfortunately, when the Almaty energy complex became the property of Traktebel, the Belgians closed these housing programmes.

But there was also a positive side to their management. The budget formation system and accounting system, built by the Belgians in accordance with the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan, are still in operation today. I think that if Traktebel had not come in 1996, we would have frozen Almaty during the difficult 1990s. At that time, we owed about 6 billion for coal alone, and we owed contractors about 8 billion for work performed. Salaries were paid in refrigerators, carpets…

But during my years working at the company, which is now called AlES, I had the opportunity to work with professionals in their field, with high-level managers who demonstrated leadership and management skills during times of crisis. One of them was Byrlyk Esirkeovich Orazbayev, who possessed unique leadership qualities. He made truly revolutionary changes to the work of TPP-2. Byrlyk Esirkeovich had high expectations of his employees and great respect for each of them. He never raised his voice. And he was the director chosen by the team itself.

Five candidates were nominated for this position. I was the chairman of the election commission, and it was a unique experience. We conducted testing and found a company that tested the personal qualities of the candidates. And Byrlyk Esirkeovich emerged as the winner. He had a systematic approach to solving all tasks: technology, finance, economics, but people always came first… In every sense, the station was fortunate that during the most difficult period in its history, it was led by a manager who was able to unite the team and overcome all challenges together.

I am now retired, but there is no such thing as a former energy worker. And everything that the thermal power plant lives for is still close to my heart…