Over 9,200 hours in the desert on three site visits

The operator needed continuous primary power at a remote site with no grid connection, in conditions that punish conventional equipment. High ambient temperatures, sand ingress and long travel distances for any engineer all work against a conventional diesel genset.

Site load varied widely through the day, from 100 W to 6.5 kW, and diesel gensets running at low load foul quickly. A comparable diesel generator at this site requires a filter change every 300 hours, so the service schedule alone drives cost, downtime and operational risk before a litre of fuel is counted.

The operator deployed a single Bladon MTG12 on a 1,000 litre diesel tank. The unit holds efficiency across its full load range, so the low load penalty that affects reciprocating engines does not apply. Air bearing technology means there is no engine oil and no liquid coolant in the machine, so there are no lubricant consumables to ship to site and none to dispose of.

Remote monitoring through the DeepSea DSE WebNet platform gives the operator live performance data and proactive alarms. Interventions are planned around a predicted fault, so the service calendar is no longer what triggers a journey to site.

The unit has run continuously since commissioning and through peak Middle Eastern summer conditions. Across the full operating period it required three site visits: air filter changes at 3,100 hours and 5,167 hours, and a single injector clean. Both filter blockages were predicted by proactive monitoring before they caused an unplanned stop, and in each case the unit was back in service within an hour. The injector clean was a simple clean out requiring no spare parts.

On a 300 hour filter interval, a comparable diesel generator would have been scheduled for more than thirty filter changes over the same period, each one a journey into the desert. The operator is now looking to deploy further units across its wider remote infrastructure.